The name is not the personal bit

The name, usually. Sometimes the hair, sometimes the town, sometimes a dedication on the first page. What does not change is the story: it was written once, illustrated once, and printed in numbers, and the child in it goes on the same journey as every other child who was ever put into it.

There is nothing wrong with that. It is a nice object and it makes a good present. It is simply a different thing from what this machine does, and the two get confused because the word “personalised” has been made to carry both.

The subject. There is no story in the press beforehand — no plot waiting for a name to be slotted into it, no shortlist of adventures to pick from. You say what the book is about and it gets written from nothing, which is why it can be about the spider that was genuinely in the bathroom this evening rather than a spider a publisher approved.

The shelf on the homepage is eight books no shop could stock. Read the reasons they got made and the distinction stops being abstract:

None of these is a story with a name in it. Each is a book about a thing that was happening in one house that week, and there is a market of exactly one for every one of them — which is precisely why no publisher will ever print them, and why a machine on the worktop is the only way they exist.

A personalised book is one reading level, because it is one book. This one is written when you ask for it, so the same idea comes out shorter and more repetitive for a two year old and considerably more demanding for a nine year old. If there are two children in the house at different ages, they can have the same story and each get a book that fits them.

Not a book — a press. It costs £199 once, and arrives with 10 books in the box. After that, cassettes of 10 are £25, or £2.50 a book, against £8 to £13 for a picture book in a shop that somebody else chose the subject of.