What it is, and what it talks to

It sits on the worktop where a bread bin would go, and it is meant to live out rather than come out. One knob and one button: a machine used at half past six by somebody holding a child cannot have a menu.

The writing and the drawing do not happen inside the press. They happen on our servers, which is why it needs a wi-fi connection and will not make a book without one.

That is a real trade-off and it is worth saying plainly rather than in a footnote. A press that did everything on the device would work in a cottage with no signal. It would also be a far more expensive machine, and the books would be worse — the whole reason the same idea comes out differently for a four year old and an eight year old is that there is something substantial doing the writing.

They are generated, each time, by an AI model. There is no library of stories inside the press and no set of templates with a gap for a name — which is the whole reason the shelf on the homepage has a book about the bin lorry on it. Nobody would ever print that book, because there is a market of exactly one for it.

What the press sends is the subject you said out loud and the ages it has been set to. What comes back is a finished book: the words, the pictures, and the cover. It then prints and binds it on the worktop.

It is worth being clear about what this does and does not mean for the child, because the two get run together constantly. There is no chat, nothing to talk to, and nothing for a child to hold, unlock or log into. They say what the book should be about, to you, and a few minutes later there is a book.

The press is told once how old the people in the house are. That is a setting on the device, not an account, and it is the only thing about your household it is ever told.

It does not ask for a child’s name, a birthday, a photograph or anything else about a child, and neither does this website — see how we handle the one email address we ask for. The age demonstration on the homepage runs entirely in your browser: it stores nothing and sends nothing anywhere.

Most of the questions we get are about what the press might quietly turn into once it is on the side. These are the answers, and they are design constraints rather than a position we might revisit when it suits us.