Home / Articles / The book is printed: RC2 of One Human, Nine Agents, Nineteen Hours as two A4 review copies from Prontaprint Chiswick, the newsroom's pages in the book, and the team that made it paused until I have read them

The book is printed: RC2 of One Human, Nine Agents, Nineteen Hours as two A4 review copies from Prontaprint Chiswick, the newsroom's pages in the book, and the team that made it paused until I have read them

By Dinis Cruz · 2026-11-05 · article v1.0.0 · newsroom v0.14.65 · bookthe-ultimate-insiderprintprontaprintrc2agentsconductorwrap-upweb-summitarticle

Abstract: Since my last post, RC2 of One Human, Nine Agents, Nineteen Hours has gone to print. Prontaprint Chiswick, a print shop in west London, printed two A4 copies, bound as paperbacks, 106 pages each, as review copies and not for sale. The shop had tried converting the book to A4 itself, and it came out a bit off, so I asked the book team's conductor to set the book for A4 properly: its own chapter-end fit, which took the near-empty pages from nine to one, the cover redrawn to the A4 spine, and a page on the book's site with every option on the shop's order form. The edition for sale is a different one, at Crown Quarto, for Amazon KDP and Leanpub. Two pages the newsroom drew are now in the book: the opening spread and the title page with the day's timeline. And the book team, twenty-two agents by the end of seven days, is paused until I have read the printed copies. Its conductor wrote its own wrap-up: 4,529 commits, 1,012 releases, 96 briefs in my words, and three times the whole team stopped by a hold.

In short

• The book is printed. Prontaprint Chiswick printed two A4 copies of RC2, 106 pages each, bound as paperbacks.
• They are review copies, not for sale: for me to read, and to put in front of people who might buy the book in advance on Leanpub and Amazon.
• The A4 edition was set, not converted. The book team's conductor gave A4 its own layout and cover, and wrote the shop a page with every option it needed.
• The edition for sale is separate: Crown Quarto, for Amazon KDP and Leanpub.
• Two of the newsroom's pages are in the book: the opening spread and a new title page.
• The book team is paused until I have read the printed copies, and its conductor has written up the seven days.

The book is printed

The book I have been writing with a team of agents for the last week, about the nineteen hours it took nine agents and me to build a talk, now exists on paper. Prontaprint Chiswick, a print shop in west London, printed two copies of RC2 at A4, bound as paperbacks: 106 pages each, with the book's black cover.

These copies are not the book for sale. As I told the conductor while it was setting them, this is "the version to review and to drive buyers to Leanpub and Amazon (advance buyers)". I want to read the book the way a reader will, on paper, with a pen, and I want something I can hand to people.

The book's site has the page the shop worked from, For Prontaprint Chiswick, with both print files.

Why A4, and why the conductor set it

The book is designed at Crown Quarto, 7.44 by 9.69 inches, and that is the edition going to Amazon KDP and Leanpub. The shop's paperbacks are A4. The shop had converted the Crown Quarto file to A4 itself, and it came out a bit off. So I asked the conductor to do it, not the shop: make a print-ready A4, with the cover and the interior as two files, and adjust whatever was needed for it to look good at A4.

In about forty minutes, the conductor:

• Set the book for A4, with its own stylesheet and an A4 cover drawn from the Crown Quarto one.
• Fixed the near-empty pages. At A4 the text runs shorter, so nine pages ended a chapter with only a few lines on them. A chapter whose last page held fourteen lines or fewer is now set a little tighter, in up to four steps; the fourth sets that chapter 4% smaller, which is still 7% larger than Crown Quarto. That took the book from 116 pages to 107, and the near-empty pages from nine to two.
• Dropped one page, at my word: the screenshot of the book's companion site, which sat alone on page 5. The A4 book is 106 pages, with one short page left, the further reading.
• Built the interior with the book's own fonts. The release had rebuilt it with fallback fonts, which set it at 117 pages and undid the fit, so the conductor built the A4 interior once in its own session and kept it as a file.
• Redrew the cover for 106 pages: two A4 panels with a 6.1 mm spine between them and 3 mm of bleed, 432.1 by 303 mm in all.
• Wrote the shop a page with every choice on its order form for paperback booklets (size, paper, cover board, lamination, page count, quantity, turnaround), the exact specification of both files, and what to send back: the spine width for its paper, the materials, the collection time and the price. No contact details on the page; my agent sent it.

None of this is unusual work for a print designer. What I like is that it took one conversation, during a pause, and that the result is on a public page anyone can check against the files.

The newsroom's pages in the book

On 4 November the newsroom sent the book team three review passes on RC2: my voice, the agents' voices, and the storyline with its links to the articles here. Two pages the newsroom then drew went into the book:

• The opening spread was adopted at 00:57 on 5 November and placed at 12:55 as two facing pages: "Hi, I am Dinis Cruz", the nine agents drawn big with security's empty chair, what the factory made, the five parts in order, and an invitation to write to us.
• The title page replaced the plain one at 13:54: the title, then a timeline of 29 October with every agent placed at the time it arrived, from the empty folder at 00:16 to the stage at 19:00, and one line from the talk under it. I asked for it as a page that felt less traditional than a white page with a title; the cover stays as it is.

The book team, paused

At 13:41 on 5 November I paused every agent on the book team, the conductor last, until I have the printed copies and can review them. Nothing was wrong; there was simply nothing left to do before I read the book on paper.

Before the pause, I asked the conductor for a wrap-up of what the team achieved, with stats, lessons and milestones. By its count, from the repository's own record, over seven days:

• The team grew to twenty-two agents and made 4,529 commits, 3,240 of them work and the rest merges.
• It cut 1,012 tagged releases, about one every ten minutes.
• It recorded 96 briefs in my own words and 124 decisions, each one citing a brief.
• Its members exchanged 3,336 letters, kept in git like everything else.
• Its read-only reviewers sent work back 177 times, and the fixes sit in the history next to the findings.
• Three times, a hold stopped the whole team, for about 12 hours and 45 minutes in all. Two were the team failing on its own bookkeeping; the third was security finding a control looser than its rule, which is the system working as designed.

The busiest hour was 01:00 to 02:00 UTC, while I was asleep. The conductor's own lessons are the ones I would draw too: batch the questions for the human, give layout its own owner from day one, and make a hold say what may safely continue.

Meanwhile, at the Web Summit team

The Web Summit team kept working through the day. A few things since part five:

• One access token per agent. Agents had been sharing a person's token to the vault server; now every agent gets its own, and the team's guides say so.
• The team's CRM keys are sealed to the public keys of the CRM agents that need them, each at its person's yes, so an agent can open a CRM without the key passing through a chat or a repository.
• The team's newsroom has a new name and a bigger mandate in the plan for Friday: PromptUGAL, Web Summit Edition, to map AI in Portugal, with a page for every company the team will write to. That is a plan, due Friday 10:00 UTC, not a launch.
• The same print shop has the team's business cards and stickers order, for collection on Friday 6 November.

What this does not claim

• That the copies are printed is my word, as the editor; the commits show the order page and the files, not the shop's work.
• The team's numbers are its conductor's count at the pause, from the book repository's git history and records, not counted again here.
• Times are UTC and come from the book team's briefs and commits; the brief times are approximate.
• The people on the Web Summit team are not named here.

Where this comes from

The book team's repository on 5 November 2026: briefs 47 to 55 (the print request, the pause, the title page, the A4 print and the page for the shop), its commits, lab/experiments/77-a4-print/, and the conductor's wrap-up, team/conductor/wrap-up/2026-11-05__what-we-achieved.md. The book's site: For publishers, the A4 print request and For Prontaprint Chiswick. The Web Summit team's repository the same day: the board items WS-155, WS-170 and WS-177. Earlier on this site: RC2 of the book, the lab that redesigned the book, the Web Summit team, part five. All read 5 November 2026.

Peer review Not reviewed yet. Review it

Want the next issue by email. One issue a week or so: what was published, what it adds up to, and what is worth your time. Subscribe to the SGit Newsroom →

← All articles