Readaway is live — turn any shelf into a trip

Expedia surveyed 24,000 travelers across 18 countries this year and found that 55% have booked — or are seriously considering — a trip based on a destination in a book they've read. They even coined a word for it: readaways. This week, My Storyland shipped ours.

Storyland has always started from the book you love — tell it what you've read and it maps the real places behind the story. What Readaway adds is a proper front door for that, and the reach to take a whole reading list at once, not just one title. (It still runs the other way too: tell it you're going to Dublin and it hands you the books set there.) There are two new doors:

mystoryland.ai/readaway — a landing page that explains what a readaway is and how to plan one, with a real FAQ. It's also cross-linked with our "books set in" reading lists, so the place-first and book-first paths feed each other.

Start a readaway in the app — pick the book you love (or several — it's a multi-book picker), and Storyland composes a grounded literary-travel itinerary through the real places behind each one: actual streets, actual buildings, mapped and walkable, with the book-to-place connection explained at every stop.

One honest build detail. Before the in-app entry was allowed to merge, it had to pass a grounding evaluation — an automated check that the itineraries it produces contain zero fabricated book-to-place links. It passed on its first run, and the entire eval cost about fifteen cents of API calls. That's the part of building with AI that I care most about getting right: the feature is only worth shipping if every connection it draws is real.

What v1 deliberately doesn't have yet: the analytics to tell me how many started readaways get finished. Measuring that properly is an open decision on my desk — I'd rather ship the door and be honest about what I can't see yet than hold the whole feature for instrumentation.

If you've ever closed a book and thought "I want to go there" — that's now a button.