MeindertQ: PDF - Document Upload Limits; Really that limited...?
Hi Ioannis,
I am still very interested in your YouBooks tool -- it has a lot of strengths, it seems. But I just read your comment about the Document Upload limitations, and those seem REALLY extremely low and constrained. You wrote this:
** There is a max file size of 10 MB per uploaded file. For all the uploaded files combined, there is a minimum word count of 2K and max word count of 500K. Finally, there is a file count limit of 20 files.**
Only a maximum total number of files of 20, each smaller than 10MB...? How could that work, if I want to use all my rough draft materials, over dozens of small docs/PDFs, and then use YouBooks to help write a mini-book series (10 books of 25000 words each). I would want that series to access all my earlier write-ups, so it can do the best possible job.
Can you please clarify?
Thanks!
Meindert
Ioannis_Youbooks
Oct 25, 2025A: The file size limit is mostly there to reduce the memory requirements on the word counting functions; it would not be difficult to increase it. However, 20 files * 10 MB = 200 MB would fit over 30M words in text files which is way beyond the 500K word limit we have for a single source.
So, the actual limit is the 500K words, not the file size. Since youbooks ingests text and not images or other data, you can try exporting any large-size files to text, and then uploading those files. If you do that, you won't ever be able to hit the file size limit.
If you have dozens of small files, then you have two choices. Merge those pdfs to one long pdf, then export to text if above file size limit, or, export each pdf to text then drop all the text in one big text file and upload that.
Finally, I know that 20 might feel not enough for your use case, but it is still way more than most ai book generators that either don't allow source uploads, or allow only one (Magic Bookifier, max 50K words). OpenAI allows 10 uploads in each message, although that is an entirely different beast.
Thanks for the detailed response, Ioannis.
I understand your workarounds, but those do feel cumbersome. Most of my materials are PDFs including design work and images, or 'designed' Word documents, regularly also with images in them. So that means that I need to go into each of these files, figure out how to export them to plain text files, and then merge them all together...
It would be so much easier if I could just upload PDFs as they are -- even if their file size is bigger, and without merging files together.
The limit is there because there needs ot be a limit. When OpenAI limits their uploads to 10, it does not mean that they cannot handle 100 uploads, but they do need to draw the line somewhere to make the trade-off. Even if I inceased the limit to say 40, there would still be customers that would run into it, so, at some point, the user does have to concatenate document or export to text.
This is definitely not ideal, but it's just the reality of resource constraints, mostly memory bound. For example, our workflow cloud engine has a limit of 50 MB which might sound like a little, but a 2.5 billion dollar company is built on top of it quite literally. We, the developers, just have to manage within that space.