Verified purchaser
Not useable right now
I am deeply interested in YouBooks and have purchased a Tier 2 deal.
I have dedicated significant effort to training a personal model, utilizing nearly a full month’s worth of credits for custom voice sources, and providing ample source materials, also equating to nearly a month’s worth of credits. Despite this extensive preparation, the final result is yet far from ready for use. Both the completed book and the author's source material are in a well-known Western romance language, though not in English.
Here are some of the issues I have encountered:
a) Formatting Issues:
Some chapter titles have inconsistent formatting, with some using numbers while others do not. Additionally, entire text blocks spanning multiple pages are in bold, and different text sections vary in size.
b) English Intrusions:
Approximately 10-20% of the book is written in English, despite the original language being different.
c) Table of Contents Issues:
The Table of Contents has not been fully adhered to, and the book ENDS abruptly at page 87, even though it was intended to be around 90,000 words, or approximately 200 pages.
d) Weak Arguments:
The book attempts to blend psychology and philosophy, a complex topic, but despite the abundance of source material provided, the content lacks depth. However, this is currently the least of the concerns.
Additionally, the book presents an error message at the beginning: “This page contains the following errors: error on line 548 at column 75: Opening and ending tag mismatch: rewritten line 548 and p. Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.”
The founder appears to be a honest and admirable person. I would prefer not to request a refund and continue using YouBooks, but I'd need assistance with the issues I've encountered and need them to be resolved.
Ioannis_Youbooks
Edited Dec 5, 2025Thank you for the review.
a) We are improving formatting consistency and have come a long way on that front. Some inconsistencies do still slip through. Increasing consistency is possible but there are diminishing returns, and most customers would not pay 2x a price for a 10% improvement. At this point, youbooks generates the most consistent long-form content of any app out there so I do think that your two stars on "consistency" issues is a bit too harsh.
b) When you submit a book, the language that it will be written in is displayed above the Submit button. Users write prompts in Spanish and ask for the book to be in English, and vice versa. If the detected language is not correct, please update the prompt to make it more explicit. If you proceed, then you have agreed to the displayed target language. If a book comes out in the wrong language, it is 100% refundable.
c) This is the first time we hear of this; it sounds like a truncation bug. This would be 100% refundable and would be fixed if reported via customer support so we can check the specific project.
d) We have ran hundreds of evals with youbooks vs other AI book generators and "depth" is one score we always come ahead by a long shot. Some users complain that it is too deep/sophisticated, and other users complain it is not enough (funny enough, we end up getting bad reviews on both accounts!). Keep in mind that you can tune depth with the prompt, the target word count, and the TOC. It is not something that you get right the first time.
On the errors you mentioned; I am afraid sometimes, edits like that slip through. Youbooks does not deliver a 100% ready to publish book. There is no app that does. There is no human author that does either. You can try cranking up the Edit Level to reduce these issues but no amunt of editing will guarantee zero issues.
Thank you for the kind words. Honestly, it sounds like your expectations are way above what we can meet right now. I am very curious if you know of any other apps that can deliver 100K words up to your spec.