What this is
A small shelf of short illustrated storybooks, for children of about three to ten, read aloud. Every one is five minutes and about ten pages, which is about as long as anybody has.
Languages
Books here are in English, Hindi and Malayalam, and each one is written in its own language rather than translated into it. That is not a technicality. A translated story keeps an English child's week and swaps the words; a story written in Malayalam has the rain, the food, the grandmother and the bus that a child in that house already knows, and every so often a child should recognise the world in a book as their own.
This matters most to families a long way from where the language is spoken. School is in English, the television is in English, and the books are in English, until the home language becomes the one thing only a grandparent uses. We are not trying to teach anybody a language — a story that is really a lesson stops being a story. We are trying to keep it in the part of childhood where stories live.
More languages will follow, but only where somebody can read every book in one before it goes up. A language we cannot check is a language we cannot publish.
How the books are made
Each book starts as a brief somebody writes — a subject, an age, sometimes a reason. The words are written to that brief, the pictures are drawn in one house style from character descriptions fixed before the first page, so the same child is the same child all the way through, and the reading is recorded voice by voice. All of it happens before the book is published.
Then a person reads the whole thing, changes what needs changing, and decides whether it goes on the shelf. Nothing is published that nobody has read.
Reading it
Every book has a lamp you can turn down for a dark room, a size control, and a switch to plainer letters with more space between them — for the roughly one child in ten who finds a storybook serif hard going, and for anyone still matching shapes to sounds. All three are remembered by your browser.
What happens when your child reads one
Nothing. There is no account to make, no name to give, and no box to type into. A book is words, pictures and sound files that were made before you arrived, so nothing your child does here is sent anywhere, and nothing is listening while they read.
Where you got to in a book is remembered by your own browser, on your own device, and by nothing else — which is why half-finished books appear under Carry on on the shelf, and why they will not be there if you clear your browser or open the site on a different device. That is the trade, and we think it is the right way round.
Money
There are no adverts, nothing to buy inside a book, and nothing aimed at your child that asks them for anything.