Verified purchaser
It's a work-in-progress going in the right direction.
I think some of the one-taco critics are really too harsh. Is Youbooks rendering perfect, ready-to-publish, 200 pages non-fiction books? Not yet, no.
Is it great for taking you 90% of the way and help you actually publish that book you've been meaning to write for 10 years? Yes, definitely.
Now, in terms of expectations, and management thereof: my first try was a pretty hefty thing that ended up as a 247 pages behemoth, that all in all was rather good for what it was. But it made me rethink how Youbooks should really be used, and in my opinion you're better off splitting your work into smaller, easier-to-consume booklets focused on one specific topic.
Being too general may result in repetitions, digressions, and a general clunkiness which to be honest might be true also for 100% handwritten work.
I think it works better with laser-focused topics and manageable page counts. And after all, who reads 200+ pages non-fiction books nowadays, unless written by extremely good writers?
Now, some legitimate frustrations (probably easy to fix, and I keep the 5 tacos to offset the unfair, in my opinion, 1 taco reviews):
1- Please use Styles for headings. Not just a change of font, not direct formatting, use actual styles so that we can modify them easily, generate a TOC, browse the book easily, etc. C'mon, this should have been there from the start.
2- Have some options to nuke clichés, overused AI-words, em dash etc. You might want to have a look at Zimmwriter, which is pretty good at generating natural-feeling text, though on a much smaller scale for sure. The book I generated is full of "In today’s tech-enabled world" or similar. A quick search on "In today's" returns 41 results... That's not OK.
3- Highlight the parts that are advice about the book and not part of the book itself. For example things like:
A diagram should be inserted here, visually representing ‘IT as Growth Partner’. This diagram illustrates IT as a central hub connected to Growth (encompassing new markets, better customer insights, and faster delivery), Risk (addressing compliance, fraud detection, and resilience), and Efficiency (driving automation, data quality, and informed decision-making) across various functions. This visual representation would enhance engagement and comprehension.
This is good of course, but please use a specific style for it, with yellow highlight or something. And again *use styles*! Not direct formatting!
Thanks a lot!
Ioannis_Youbooks
Edited Oct 3, 2025Super hyped for receiving another balanced and constructive review :)
Straight to your points.
1) Need some clarification for this one. Which file are you previeing, epub, word? We live the output style bare because if we were to use a specific style, that would make Youbooks books immediately identifiable which is not what many customers want. The structure/headings, is there though, with the markdown file being the "authoritative" source. I might have missed your point though, not sure, can you clairfy?
2) Super point. We are actually taking an opinionated stand here and I would love to hear your thought. Many apps out there offer "humanization" which is basically a process of stripping the AI generated output of its model watermark. The inevitable outcome of this, is that the new output has the watermark of the humanizing model. There is no way around this, scientifically; it's just text, and at reasonable "entropy" its distribution will directly match back to the originating model. Our solution was to allow every customer to create custom models for themselevs. These are small models that are trained to the customer's supplied text. It's a pretty hefty task in terms of engineering, if you think about it - how many companies offer model fine-tuning? We also don't take shortcuts (Lora, etc) we train the models end to end, on cloud GPUs. Anyways, the result of this process is that every "humanizing" model, has its own distribution, is unique, and cannot be mapped back to a public humanizing model that thousands of people use.
In summary, we let the AI output be what it is, without trying to prompt engineer humanized content out of it. This offers a flat, AI-watermarked, predictable output, that might work for some use cases. To make this human (the right way) you need to select a human model. The 20% markup is actually small compared to the amount of additional processing (and time it takes) to produce the book.
3) Great, going to try to integarte this into our editing rounds now.
On your comment "and in my opinion you're better off splitting your work into smaller, easier-to-consume booklets focused on one specific topic." If you split a project to multiple projects (aiming to connect them later) then the editing rounds will not see the whole project in context, which will reduce cohesion. The sweet spot is around 100K words target. However, if your split is very sharp, and you use the same human model, you might get good results in the context of a series, rather than one book.
Cheers!