We would rather say we do not know.

Why the pipeline reports steps, not a percentage

Generating a book takes minutes, and the stages take wildly different amounts of time. Research might take forty seconds; drafting twenty-four chapters does not. A single percentage across the whole run is therefore least accurate exactly when somebody is sitting and watching it, and ninety per cent for four minutes is worse than no number at all — it reads as a stall.

So the product does not have a percentage. Not hidden, not optional: the data model does not offer one, and there is a test that fails if anyone adds it. A book records the stage it has reached, and the stages it has finished. A client renders what is done and what is happening now. “Writing chapter 7 of 24” tells you where you are and roughly how much is left, which is the thing a progress indicator is supposed to do.

The same rule, applied to ourselves

Our own internal capacity screen reports two signals as not measurable rather than as zero, because the part of the system that would produce them is not deployed yet. A zero would have rendered as green, and green would have meant “healthy, nothing queued” — which would have been a comfortable lie on the one screen whose job is to warn us.

It would have been less work to show the zeros. That decision is the clearest short statement of how this product is built.

What we will not claim

• That the pre-flight check makes a book good. It checks whether a retailer will accept the file. Those are different questions and only one of them is mechanical.
• That generated prose needs no editing. Every stage is editable for that reason, and the outline stage exists because structural changes are cheap there and expensive later.
• That we have finished answering the question of how upstream services retain text during generation. We have not. It is written down as an open item, and it is on the privacy page rather than buried.

The company

BookGrid is operated by UNIQUE-EDGE INNOVATIONS LTD, which also runs other products. That is why every charge names the product it belongs to — a line on a bank statement should tell you what you bought and from whom, without a search.