What is a personalised e-book, and what should it actually change?
Updated
Short answer
A personalised e-book is written for one reader rather than printed for everyone. The weak version pastes your name into a fixed text. The real version changes the substance: which chapters exist, in what order, which examples and exercises it uses, and which mistakes it warns you about — so two readers of the same title get different books.
Two things called by the same name
"Personalised" covers two very different products, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at before you pay.
- Name-in-the-text. A finished book with blanks: your name, maybe a city, dropped into sentences everyone else also receives. Charming as a gift; changes nothing about what the book says.
- Written to the reader. The content itself depends on who is reading. The order of the chapters, the examples, the exercises, the failure modes it warns about — all of it follows something the book knows about you.
The test: would two readers get different books?
Ask one question of any personalised book: if someone else bought the same title, how much of their copy would differ from mine? If the honest answer is "the name on page one", it is a template. If whole chapters, their order and their advice differ, it was written to you.
What it needs to know about you
A book can only be written to you if it has something real to go on. Asking people to describe themselves tends to produce the version they would like to be. Pills of Matrix uses kokology instead: twenty-one imagined scenes with no right answer, read along eight axes — where your drive comes from, how fast you move, whether you build or flow, and so on. Your name, year of birth and where you live then set the context the examples are drawn from.
What should change, concretely
- The contents page. Chapters are chosen and ordered by what your answers put first. You should be able to see it before paying.
- The examples. Set where you live and in the work you do, not in a generic American office.
- The exercises. Sized for your pace — a daily habit for someone steady, a cleared runway for someone who works in bursts.
- The warnings. The mistakes people shaped like you tend to make, named plainly.
How one gets made, step by step: how a book written for one reader actually gets made.
Questions people also ask
- Is a personalised e-book written by a person or by AI?
- Pills of Matrix editions are written by an AI writing system working from a brief built from your reading, inside an editorial structure designed for each title. We say so plainly; we did not train our own language model.
- Can I see what I am getting before I pay?
- Yes. After the twenty-one scenes you see your reading and the contents page of your book, free and without an account.
- How long does a personalised e-book take to arrive?
- It is written after you order, so it is not instant. Chapters appear in your account as they are written, and the PDF follows when the book is finished.
- Can I give one as a gift?
- The book is written from the reader's own answers, so the person it is for needs to answer the scenes themselves.
Self Improvement
Have Dream Weaver written for the way you work.
Twenty-one scenes, about eight minutes, no account. You see your reading and your contents page before you pay. £9.99, delivered as a PDF.