We think a child is already an author

Tom leads AI, software, electronics and technical integration. Paul leads machine design, prototypes and manufacturing engineering. Martin leads the brand and creative direction.

To let a child be the author of a real book years before they could write one.

Not a book about them. Not a book somebody else wrote with their name dropped into it. One they decided — who it is about, where it happens, what goes wrong — printed and ready to hold and read together, with their name on the front under the word “by”.

Talebrix does the writing and the drawing, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up; there is a whole page about who writes these, because it is the fair question and it deserves more than a reassuring sentence.

A child can decide every part of that, and some will. We expect most to say “a dragon one” and then nothing else, and that is the ordinary case rather than a failure of it: it asks, it takes whatever they want to give, and it writes the rest. What it will not do is write over the part they did decide. The more they say, the more of the book is theirs.

The measure of whether this worked is not whether an adult thinks the book is any good. It is whether it gets asked for again the next night, and the night after that, and whether the child tells somebody they made it.

Ordinary shelves in ordinary houses, where some of the books have a child’s name on the front under the word “by”.

What we would like to change is what “my book” means to a small child: not one they own, one they made. A child holding a book they authored has been told something about themselves that no amount of encouragement quite manages — and been told it by an object rather than by an adult being kind, which is a different order of true.

Everything after that only matters if that part is true first. The list of things we do not intend to build is about as long as the list of things we do: no account for the child, no feed, no subscription, and nothing anywhere for them to unlock. If this ever becomes a reason a child asks for a screen, we will have made the wrong thing.

It began as a husband and wife in a spare room in Farnham, with a great many drawings and a machine being made to work. The team is small and still growing: the machine has an engineer who owns it, and the next person we are looking for is somebody to take it to the families who want one. We started Talebrix in August 2026 because of something we kept noticing and could not talk ourselves out of.

A child will tell you, unprompted, from the back of a car, about a bear who is frightened of the dark and lives in a lift. It will have a beginning, a problem and an ending. It will be better than at least half of what is on the shelf at home. And unless somebody happens to write it on the back of an envelope, that is the last anyone will ever hear of it.

The window is short, which is the part that got us. There are four or five years between a child having ideas worth keeping and having the handwriting to keep one — the years in which they invent the most and can record the least — and it closes quietly. What survives it is a folder of paintings in the loft and two or three things you half remember and get wrong.

It is not for want of things to make things with. It is that all of them ask a child to read, to spell, or to cut a straight line, so the making gets done for them and handed over finished — and the one thing they are already extraordinary at, which is deciding, is the thing nothing takes seriously. That seemed to us like the wrong way round, and worth a few years of our lives to put right.

So the problem was never writing a story. It was getting a real, printed, bound book out of a child’s decisions while they are still in the room and still interested. That is a hardware problem far more than a writing one, and it is why this is a machine on a bedroom shelf rather than an app on your phone.

Farnham, Surrey. Talebrix is designed and made here; the books get made in your house, which is the only part of the manufacturing we are not doing.

Write to hello@talebrix.com and one of us will answer — not a form, and not eventually. If you are asking whether it will do a particular thing, that is genuinely useful to us at this stage: nothing is finished yet, and the answer can still change because somebody asked.