A Claude skill that turns textbooks into books that talk back

What it does

Papermorph is a Claude Code Skill that takes a textbook PDF (or a story you tell it) and produces a whole interactive web book: chapters with step-by-step animated diagrams synced to narration, quizzes that grade the maths rather than string-matching, saved progress, and captions. Stories get a different treatment — short films with paper puppets, painted sets, voices, subtitles, and sound effects. The output is plain static pages: no server, no database, no account, just a folder you can host anywhere.

The interesting bit

The pipeline is unusually self-critical: the model reviews its own output via contact sheets, blank-frame checks, and end-to-end tests, and a picture-book run includes director and reviewer roles that send scenes back until they hold up. Each book also carries its own copy of the player engine, so an engine update never breaks an existing book — versioning is handled with tags and a sync script.

Key highlights

• Three book types: maths (animated formulas and diagrams), science (illustrated scenes with camera work), and picture books (puppet films with voices and music).
• A shared player: pause, step through, jump to any beat, speed control, captions, per-book progress, and UI in English, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese.
• Exports to 1080p MP4 with subtitles, and packages as SCORM 1.2/2004 for LMS use — both opt-in.
• Model-agnostic; the demo books were built with Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1-Sol, and Sonnet 5.5.
• Style choices persist in style.json, so later chapters match earlier ones.

Caveats

• Not free to run: an illustrated physics chapter costs roughly $10–18 in model usage (painted picture-book sets are under $0.20).
• Narration via Edge TTS needs internet; Kokoro runs locally. Painted sets require an image-model API key.
• Publishing a book derived from someone else’s textbook is a copyright question you have to answer yourself.

Verdict

Worth a look if you build educational content and want interactive, self-checking lessons you fully own as static files. If you just need a one-off animated explainer, simpler tools will do.