How we check a book

Whoever made it never passes it

A book is checked at every step, from the plan to after it reaches you. At each step a different reader, an AI or a person, looks for one kind of fault.

These are today’s checks. A new kind of fault gets a new check, so older drafts met fewer.

From the plan to your hands

Before writing: what is missing?

For a book we design ourselves, five AI readers from three companies each read the outline on their own. They look for what the reader needs but the book leaves out, what it spends too long on, and what comes in the wrong order.

A missing chapter cannot be seen by any later reader of the book.

A syllabus book starts from the syllabus. Every topic in it is traced into the book before it is finished.

Every claim, no wider than its source

Five readers go through each chapter’s claims. Is each one true? Is any stated more widely than its source allows?

At least one of our readers is kept away from our sources on purpose and checks each claim against the world instead. Sources can carry errors too, and this catches them.

Each new question, tried with the answer hidden

A reader answers each new question without seeing our answer and says whether the book teaches it. If the reader disagrees with us, or can rule out two options without knowing the subject, we rewrite the question once. If it fails again, it stays out.

Scripts catch the cheap giveaways. The right answer may not be the longest option, and each wrong option must be a mistake students make. A test across all the questions looks at where the right answers fall.

Figures, read with the words covered

A figure design is shown to a fresh reader with no caption and no chapter, who says what it shows. A figure drawn from numbers is redrawn from those numbers by a separate check, and if the two differ it does not go in.

Page 342 of the book, from the Circles chapter. Two right triangles share a hypotenuse of 13 and a side of 5, with the Back, Rule and Key notes above and a Check yourself below. — Page 342: the figure carries the rule, with or without its caption.

Many readers before it reaches us

Separate AI readers each look for one kind of fault in a built chapter: a gap in the logic, a slow stretch, a machine-made sentence. One judge reads every finding and drops what the text disproves. Nothing serious may stay open.

Then we read it ourselves, first as text, then on the page. Each change we make becomes a rule for every chapter after it.

Two scorers who did not write it

Twice a book, two AI readers from different companies score the whole book on the same eight measures. They work blind to each other, neither made the edits, and each score quotes its page. If they differ by two points, we read the evidence.

Correct, covers its plan, fits its reader, explains, pictures that work, consistent, not machine-sounding, ready to hand over.

The whole book, read as one

Some faults show only across chapters: a date that disagrees with an earlier one, a promise never kept, a sentence used twice, a voice that drifts. Once the book is whole, a script and a reader who tracks its dates check for them.

Done means two clean passes, not one

Every page is rendered and read, and a fault is fixed where it starts. A book is finished after two clean passes in a row, and whoever fixed a page does not score it. After three rounds, a person decides.

Page 34 of the book, Exercise 1.1. The first question is worked in full with a reason beside each step, and every answer in the set is printed under it. — Page 34: the answers sit under the set, with the full working online.

After it reaches you

Every page carries manthika.com/fix. A mistake we accept there is corrected once, in the book’s source, so every later copy carries the fix.

Report a mistake

What these checks are not

Most of these checks report to a person. They do not stop a book on their own; a person decides.

An AI reader is not a teacher. No check here takes the place of a teacher’s or an expert’s read.

None of this measures marks. We have not yet run a study of whether our books raise a student’s marks.

From the plan to your hands

We also counted our books against the textbook How we write a book