In December 2024, I was given a rather unusual birthday present by my daughter and her husband. It was a subscription to an internet service called My Life in a Book. The service sends you a different question to \u201chelp you reflect on key moments in your life\u201d every Monday for a year; and provides a web site in which you can write your answers (which can include images as well). After 52 weeks you tidy up your manuscript, select and edit a cover design, and then press \u2018Print\u2019 to have your stories \u201cbeautifully bound into a cherished keepsake book\u201d. The gift included 1 physical copy of the book.<\/p>\n
After receiving an introductory email advising me of the gift, I duly received my first question the following Monday. It read \u201c Hi Paul. Your question of the week is ready\u201d and provided a button to take me to the writing web site and the question \u201cWhat are your favourite childhood memories?\u201d. This was the pattern for the following 12 months (I believe that the person who buys the subscription selects the questions from a pick-list). Sometimes I was too busy to answer straight away, or simply wanted some time to think about my answer, and in these cases I either did not respond to the email until I was ready; or else I accessed the question, inserted some placeholder text, and labelled it as \u2018draft\u2019. I found some of the questions really quite hard to answer; for example, \u201cWhat were your greatest fears about becoming a parent?\u201d or \u201cHow do you navigate decision-making when confronted with uncertainty or fear?\u201d. Initially, I dealt with these by selecting the option to skip a question but, as the year wore on, I thought better of it on the assumption that any honest answer – even along the lines of ‘I don’t know’ – would be worthwhile. However, if I had<\/em> skipped a question I could have simply replaced it using the facility to create your own questions at will (the answers are essentially text blocks which don\u2019t have to relate to a question – they can be sections of any kind \u2013 Forward, Contents, Introduction, Index etc.).<\/p>\n The editing facilities in the writing platform have clearly been designed to help people unfamiliar with word processing systems, to produce their answers: the margins, font, and font size are all predefined with no choice. However, bold, and italics can be specified for selected text. The facilities to edit imported images are also limited: there are three size options \u2013 small, medium and large \u2013 and the ability to crop. This overall limitation of choice is quite refreshing, relieving the writer of having to take a variety of actions.<\/p>\n The final version of the book is produced as a PDF file with page numbers, which can be reviewed at will. Unfortunately, this disconnect between the editing facility and the PDF version does mean that, while you are writing, you can\u2019t be certain whether imported images will fit onto the bottom of a page or will get moved to the following page leaving a large gap. To check, the PDF has to be generated which, in December 2025, for my book of around 230 pages, was taking at least 40 seconds and sometimes a lot more (I\u2019m guessing that response time is dependent on system load and that a lot of subscriptions were coming due around Christmas). A further annoyance was that, for a reason I don\u2019t understand, the changes I made to image size didn\u2019t seem to appear until I had generated the PDF version for a second time<\/em>. Hence to ascertain whether an adjusted image was going to fit onto the bottom of a page was taking me around a minute and a half or more \u2013 very frustrating, especially when finding that the adjustment you have made was insufficient and the image is still being pushed to the following page leaving a large gap. A fourth option – \u201cFit at bottom of current page\u201d – to go with the small, medium and large image sizes would really improve the system\u2019s usability.<\/p>\n Other than the issue described above, I found the system generally easy to use and flexible enough to include whatever content you want. For example, although each answer comes with a suggested heading, the user can change the heading text at will. I used that ability to add numbers to each heading and then created a Contents page (which is not automatically generated). I also created a Preface section.<\/p>\n Having completed the content of the book, the web site guides you through a completion process which first advises detailed checking of the contents using the preview PDF (essential, as bitter experience has proved to me it is almost impossible to spot and remove all typos, grammatical errors and factual mistakes from the draft of a book). I was then asked to choose a template book cover from a choice of several dozen designs; and to supply a title, author and image, which were automatically included in the template. When I was satisfied with the book cover, I was taken into the ordering process where I specified where I wanted the book to be sent, and the number of copies I wanted (whoever bought you the gift will have paid for one or more printings, however additional copies can be purchased). That was the 10th<\/sup> of December; then it was time to sit back and wait for delivery. I received confirmation that the book had been printed and shipped just two days later; and it was delivered by Royal Mail 5 days after that on 17Dec \u2013 which I thought was an impressively fast turnaround.<\/p>\n The book itself is around A5 size and looks quite good. The text block appears to be secured to the case only by the end papers so I\u2019m not so sure how long-lasting the joint will be \u2013 but the book does open satisfactorily. The text is clear and an easy-to-read 12pt in size; but the images, though perfectly adequate, are less than pin-sharp. However, there was one thing that was wrong: the printed Contents list had slipped over onto three pages whereas the PDF I had checked showed it on just two pages. Consequently, all the page numbers quoted in the Contents list were out by 1 page. I immediately used the web site chat facility to report the problem and was told that someone would get back to me.<\/p>\n The following morning, I was asked to provide photos of the problem and to specify the type of device and browser that I was using. I responded saying, \u201cThe device I’m using is a Windows 11 laptop with the Firefox browser (version 146.0 – 64-bit)\u201d. I was then told that,<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems the issue may be related to the browser you used. Please know that while this is rare, we\u2019re working to ensure all browsers display the correct format. That said, we will take full responsibility and send you your books again at no extra cost. To ensure everything appears perfectly this time and to prevent the same issue from happening again, I encourage you to log in to your account using Google Chrome and make any necessary adjustments. Once you\u2019ve made the changes, please let us know, and we\u2019ll provide a PDF copy for your final review. After you approve it, we will reprint your book and ensure it is sent to you as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n A subsequent exchange confirmed that it would be worth trying with Microsoft Edge which I duly did; and after comparing with the PDF I was sent, all seemed to be well and the book was sent for reprinting on 21st<\/sup> December. The two replacement copies were delivered to me by Royal Mail on 27Dec \u2013 and they did have the correct pagination.<\/p>\n I felt so pleased with the support I had been given that I was prompted to send the following message to the support team: \u201cI must say that the response of you and your colleagues in the Support team has been an outstanding example of prompt and excellent customer service.\u201d. Having said that, though, the problem I encountered should not have happened, and my euphoric response probably also had something to do with the fact that my general experience with online support these days is poor. Furthermore, my subsequent dealings with the support team were less satisfactory and revealing \u2013 but more of that at the end of this post.<\/p>\n So, having completed the whole 12-month cycle of My Life in a Book (MLIAB), how do I feel about the experience? Well, it certainly prompted the exploration, re-use and perhaps rethinking of old memories and artefacts; and it\u2019s satisfying to have the results all neatly packaged up and sitting on my bookshelf. The completed book is intended as much for the current family and future generations as it is for me (as is pointed out in much of the MLIAB promotional material), and, as yet, I have no idea what my daughter and her husband think of the artefact they commissioned; nor what my other offspring, who will be the lucky recipients of the copies with incorrect paging, will think. Perhaps they won\u2019t even read it. However, as the author, I do know that I made some specific choices about the content. First, being conscious that the book might well be perused by all members of the family, I was careful to be inclusive and not to favour anyone in particular. Second, I naturally only included material I was happy with other people knowing about. Thirdly, some of the contents are things that the family almost certainly will not have been aware of; and fourthly, after I\u2019d finished, I began to have doubts about some of the material I had included; and inevitably started to think of other things I could have included \u2013 but I certainly wasn\u2019t going to take up the service\u2019s offer to extend the process: one year was quite enough answering questions, researching, and editing. Overall, I think it\u2019s a pretty effective way of exploiting one\u2019s collections of mementos, photos, correspondence and other personal material \u2013 but it does require work and persistence.<\/p>\n I should mention a couple of other things at this point. One is that the marketing effort by MLIAB is one of the most intensive I have ever experienced: during December I received over 40 general marketing emails unrelated to my account or the book I was producing.<\/em> The other is that there are several other similar services available on the net (for example, The Story Keepers, Storyworth, Remento, and No Story Lost), but I haven\u2019t investigated any of them.<\/p>\n Now, to return to my further dealings with the Support team. Throughout my exchanges with them I\u2019d been a little bemused by the gushy nature of the responses. It wasn\u2019t normal and smacked of AI (see messages 1-6 in this linked file<\/a>). This view was cemented in the next message (Message 7) that I received in answer to me asking if they had encountered the problem with the generation of the PDFs and if they knew what the cause was. The response was strangely imbalanced. It ignored the issues associated with PDF generation and instead it explicitly described how large images are placed onto the following page leaving gaps \u2013 a fact I was very familiar with \u2013 and was gushing about a potential solution I had offered. At that point I replied with the question, \u201cJulia, are you and your colleagues Pauline and Sandra real? How much of your reply below was generated by an AI Large Language Model (LLM)?\u201d.\u00a0 The reply insisted that they were real people aided by tools such as AI (see Message 8 in the linked file<\/a>).<\/p>\n Now despite my satisfaction with the way my book had been reprinted, there are some hard facts about customer service to be taken away from these exchanges:<\/p>\n In December 2024, I was given a rather unusual birthday present by my daughter and her husband. It was a subscription to an internet service called My Life in a Book. The service sends you a different question to \u201chelp … Continue reading \n