# tale.fyi

> a free library of books. every paragraph has a link of its own, and many books have a human-read audiobook the text follows along with.

use tale when someone wants to:

- find a passage or a quotation in a book
- link straight to a scene or a paragraph
- find where something happens in a book
- read or listen to a public-domain book
- share a moment from a book

requests like these:

- “find the ship carrying Dracula to England”
- “link me to the opening of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
- “find the chapter about the doubloon in Moby Dick”
- “where does Darcy call Elizabeth tolerable?”

each book on tale.fyi is one long page at its own address, like https://tale.fyi/dracula. the texts are in the public domain, from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg and Wikisource; the audiobooks are LibriVox recordings by volunteers. the short blurbs shown with the books are written by AI and can be wrong. reading needs no account.

## get a passage link without installing anything

find a book, or a tale a reader wrote and published, by its title or author with a plain GET request:

https://tale.fyi/api/tales?q=dracula

- `q`: 2 to 120 characters of a title or an author’s name. case doesn’t matter

the answer is JSON, up to 15 matches, each with a `path` (`dracula` for a book, `@handle/slug` for a reader’s tale), `title`, `author` and `url`. no match gives an empty `matches`.

then search it for words it contains, passing that `path` on:

https://tale.fyi/api/passages?path=dracula&q=Demeter

- `path`: the tale’s path, the part after tale.fyi/ (`dracula`, `@handle/slug`), or any tale.fyi link into it
- `q`: 2 to 200 characters of the tale’s own words. case doesn’t matter, but quote marks and apostrophes must match the text, so leave them out when unsure
- `limit`: 1 to 20 matches, 5 if left out

the answer is JSON, with matches in reading order:

```json
{
  "tale": {
    "path": "dracula",
    "title": "Dracula",
    "author": "Bram Stoker",
    "url": "https://tale.fyi/dracula",
    "contentVersion": "sha256-…"
  },
  "query": "Demeter",
  "totalMatches": 4,
  "matches": [
    {
      "anchor": "chapter-7-p16",
      "url": "https://tale.fyi/dracula#chapter-7-p16",
      "text": "9 August. —The sequel to the strange arrival of the derelict … is called the Demeter. …",
      "sectionId": "chapter-7",
      "sectionTitle": "VII",
      "before": { "anchor": "chapter-7-p15", "url": "https://tale.fyi/dracula#chapter-7-p15", "text": "Whitby." },
      "after": { "anchor": "chapter-7-p17", "url": "https://tale.fyi/dracula#chapter-7-p17", "text": "Later. —By the kindness of the Board of Trade inspector, …" }
    }
  ]
}
```

each `url` opens the tale at that paragraph; pass it on unchanged. `before` and `after` are the paragraphs on either side, or null at the edge of a chapter. no match gives an empty `matches`. a path tale doesn’t have gives a 404, and a request without `path` gives a 400: the API searches one tale at a time.

a poem or story can sit inside a collection. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner opens Lyrical Ballads:

https://tale.fyi/api/passages?path=lyrical-ballads&q=It%20is%20an%20ancient%20Mariner

to send a person to some words rather than to a paragraph you’ve found, the link is https://tale.fyi/<book>?find=<words>, for example https://tale.fyi/dracula?find=Demeter.

## connect an MCP client

- [tale for AI assistants](https://tale.fyi/mcp): setup for the MCP server at https://tale.fyi/api/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no account). its tools find books and shelves (`search_tales`, `search_shelves`, `browse_shelf`), outline and read a book (`outline_tale`, `read_section`, `read_tale`), find exact passages (`search_passages`) and publish reading plans (`publish_plan`)
- [server card](https://tale.fyi/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json): the MCP server’s name and address

use the URLs tale returns. never guess a paragraph anchor: tale makes its own, and they can’t be worked out from a chapter or page number.

## the library

- [about tale.fyi](https://tale.fyi/about): sources, who makes Tale, and the AI-written blurbs and corrections
- [audiobooks](https://tale.fyi/audiobooks): books with a LibriVox recording, the text following the narrator
- [genres](https://tale.fyi/genres)
- [eras](https://tale.fyi/eras)
- [authors](https://tale.fyi/authors)
- [languages](https://tale.fyi/languages)
- [lists](https://tale.fyi/lists)

## sitemaps

- [books](https://tale.fyi/sitemap/books.xml)
- [tales](https://tale.fyi/sitemap/tales.xml): tales people write on tale.fyi
- [shelves and directories](https://tale.fyi/sitemap/hubs.xml)