youbooks Reviews

Tried it 2 times to get a book (used another account to test it, but subscribed after that with AppSumo anyway as I guess you guys will handle this within the future). Somehow the chapters and titles within the book are messed up. Probbaly it's better not to serve a Table of Terms. The chapter numbering within the whole book is pretty confusing. Sometimes chapters are made double.

The Translation costs are pretty immensive: "Top-up at least 195.993 credits to translate" It' Even much more as to get a new book. I thin I spent 80K Credits to create the book.

Overall my test: It's not bad and a lot of potentialin it, but at the momen it could not deliver what it promissed. I can't test any furter as I already spend 20€ to extend my credits, but I am not willing to invest more for stuff I can't use and help you to get your product up running ;)
Thomas

I did some other "AI" writer more than 5 years ago and I had to grade it a C- to a D-, almost unusable. Things have changed a lot since then. This isn't a 1st generation product and it's nice to give feedback to and get responses from Ioannis, the purveyor. We had a back and forth over some of the pain points where editing is the largest painpoint of this product if you want it published. A bunch of things have been fixed and there is an analyzer of the prompt which grades it to 100. The 6000 character prompt limit is a problem if your book outline/toc is 9-12+ chapters. Human model does well for words over a certain amount. There should be another section with its own limit for the toc/outline because of the 6000 character limit. https://www.youbooks.com/roadmap shows citation concerns that are being worked on. For example, "RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) hallucinations are instances where a large language model (LLM) generates incorrect or fabricated information even when using retrieved documents for context." Giving this feedback helps them to consider Chicago footnote style citations/references and bibliography page automation instead of us simply getting an export of URLs for us to edit which is on the roadmap. The TOS of websites like Reddit does not allow for scraping for training. But, you can use sources like sourcely.net (site is down as of this writing but I've subscribed before). They have a future vision for Advanced Publishing, among 3 others, but they can simply offer an API key for developers. If not, allowing for a 3rd party addon marketplace for post-production editing is also good but more complex under contractual agreement. They fixed the header problem which makes it easier for you to edit portions of your deliverable. If things are modularlized, then that opens up the possibility of them adding features after your book is delivered such as adding chapters. If you ask for doctorate level content, other AI models find it as high quality. I've had it make more than 50+ books. The exact number is known by OCR into Google Sheets and categorized for genre and subgenre. It's going to take you some time to nail down your own process. It's capable of making fiction (I have not tried) because the prompt box takes in a toc/outline. But you have to know what to parameterize. "Use Freytag's Pyramid framework (for the plot), temperature (randomness) average, base it on the real life story of..., use this outline/toc, use a narrative structure with dialogue, etc." I've had it write me a language learning book and it's in the A range as a product. It does disregard your toc suggestions to a certain extent but now, you can review and modify it. Ethics-wise, it is biased mainly in your favor and the RAG guardrails of the AI model. But, all AI models are sophisticated mimicry which precludes them from true creativity, productivity, value creation, and human connection. Human review is required based on the subject matter as it can side with misinformed consensus instead. An example of this is for me as a creationist is macro-evolution. The AI models used does do RAG in varying degrees but the conclusions are invalid since it can disregard quantified data and pick false qualitative and published data. LLMs are part statistical guesswork on the contents of the sentence and the next sentence in a paragraph. It does logic checks more with the outline and its consulting the Named Entity Recognition (NER) database for things like country names. For example, most mutations are harmful and thus evolution cannot overcome the beneficial frequency required with the low number of beneficial mutations for it to be true. Protein folding can't be explained either by evolution, etc. with 3d search by randomness taking 10^33 years to find the correct one. So, it mimics reasoning but it can still hallucinate (fabricate sentences) even with RAG since it can’t do human logic based on its academic processing framework. You can tell it to stick with quantitative logic but they don’t know what to quantify then. However, this platform also has huge potential and fiction is more lucrative but the manual post-production editing is very time consuming depending on your topic. It is only as good as your understanding of prompt engineering, and that took me several months through trial and error. I wish Ioannis/Youbook much success. Great product if your goal is to have lifetime ghost writing assistance. (Fixed grammar errors). Totally worth the highest tiers you can get depending on your business case.

Bought Tier 3 of YouBooks. Got great help for their support team. The AI model actually took the time to do the work. No rush to push junk out. I encourage a few over the shoulder videos to help me learn to use all the features. I think it is a great product. I am a premium+ user of Grok3, premium user of Perplexity and ChatGPT. Youbooks does a better job than any of these. Youbooks does some sort of iterative, or step by step review of the book you are working and then gives a ton of useful information. I am looking forward to using it to assist me in my educational design work.

I have been using YouBooks for a week now; it's great for getting a first draft that is 80% of the work (research, structure, some editing). I still have to do my own edits but I am happy with the time savings. Honestly, this is probably the only "AI book maker" app right now. As far as I know no other app can do 100,000 words which is pretty standard for a non-fiction book.

Dud is the only word that comes to mind, which is one more word than I was able to get this program to create. Can I be any more clear?

Terrible product. 1 out of 10. Do not recommend.

For context, I have attempted to start a 60k word book three times consecutively - not once has it actually formalized a single word. I'll be back to update if things improve in my sweatshop.