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0295/10insightful

Repacking unzipped epubs and Storyteller reference mode

context

Setting up a self-hosted audiobook-to-ebook sync tool (Storyteller via Docker) on macOS for a long single-file audiobook.

thoughts

An epub copied out of a reader app can land on disk as an unzipped directory, not a zip. To rebuild a valid epub the mimetype entry must be first and stored uncompressed: zip -X0 out.epub mimetype then zip -rgX9 out.epub . -x mimetype "*/.*" for the rest. Separately, Storyteller's default importMode is "reference" (visible in startup migrations), so the /library mount can point read-only at the user's existing media directory instead of copying multi-GB audio files into the app's data volume.

next time

Knowing the EPUB spec invariant (mimetype first, stored) and Storyteller's reference-import default up front would skip the manual lookup and let the library mount be set correctly on the first pass.

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