When children grow up across languages, their books should too.

Who's building this

Two parents, building for our own family first.

BookCloud is being built by a husband-and-wife team raising our child across three languages and cultures. We're not trying to build the world's biggest children's app. We're trying to build the one we wanted for our own child — and quietly extending it, family by family, with the parents and collaborators who tell us they wanted the same thing.

What we believe

A few convictions you can see in the product.

• A child's reading time isn't for sale. No ads, no third-party trackers, no broker selling your child's attention to anyone.

• Reading is reading. Not points, not streaks, not a game with a scoreboard.

• Built to be put down. Stories can pull your child back. We won't — no streaks, no "your character missed you," no autoplay engineered to start the next session for them. The product should be easy to leave — that's a feature, not a flaw.

• We add to reading, we don't replace it. Every book opens ready to read together — a grown-up and a child sharing a story, the way reading actually takes root. A screen brings stories your shelf doesn't have, in languages you can read side by side; it isn't a substitute for the book in your hands, or for you.

• We level books, not children. A reading level describes the book, and it's there for you. We never test your child, never rank them, and will never tell you they're "behind." Listening to a story, or reading it beside you, is real reading — not cheating.

• Made for every kind of reader. Large, hyperlegible type and a calm, motion-gentle design come as standard, not as a settings panel — because roughly one child in ten is dyslexic, and inclusion shouldn't be a toggle.

• Trust is earned slowly. A children's product is judged by the trust of parents — and we plan to earn it one family at a time, or not at all.

• Multiple languages aren't a niche. The cultures and languages your family carries are not a feature we're adding. They're the point.

Where the stories come from

Our library belongs to the commons.

The stories on BookCloud aren't ours. They're drawn from the public domain — works whose copyright has lapsed and now belong to everyone — and from non-profit publishers who openly share their work under licenses like Creative Commons BY 4.0. Some of the public-domain ones are old tales we bring back as freshly-illustrated picture books, retold for young readers today.

A particular debt is owed to StoryWeaver, a non-profit children's publisher from Pratham Books whose openly licensed catalogue of stories in hundreds of languages is part of what makes BookCloud possible. Every author, illustrator, and translator is credited inside the book itself, alongside the upstream source — so families who love a story can follow it back to the people who made it, and find more of their work.

We chose this path because a multilingual children's library only works if its stories are free to move. Stories that can be translated, narrated aloud, and shared across languages without permission letters are stories that can reach the next child in the next language. We try to offer both mirrors and windows — stories that reflect your child's own life and family, and stories that open a window onto someone else's, in the languages your family lives in. We're trying to be good citizens of that commons — using it carefully, crediting it generously, and learning how to contribute back. If you're a native speaker who could help review translations, or a parent willing to test stories with your family and tell us what works, we'd like to hear from you.

How the editions get made

Brought back, and brought across, with care.

Some books are openly-licensed stories already shared in many languages. Others are public-domain tales we adapt into picture-book form and illustrate afresh. Adapting, illustrating, translating, and narrating at the pace a growing library needs used to be the work of years — so we use AI to help draft the adaptation, the pictures, the translation, and the narration, with safeguards along the way.

Then we review every edition before it reaches a child, and we credit on each book what a person made and what was AI-assisted, so you always know. Where a heritage language has almost no children's books at all, an AI voice isn't a downgrade — it's the difference between a story your child can hear in your language and no story at all. If something feels off in a story your child is reading, tell us — that's how we get better.

Stage

Quietly building, deliberately slowly.

BookCloud is a real reader, and it's early. Right now it's in invite-only testing with a small group of families across several countries and languages. From here it opens up — first to public testing, then as a free download on iOS and Android — and the library grows language by language. We'd rather get this right than get this big.

If what you've read here matches what you want for your family, write to us — for an early invite, to help review a translation if you're a native speaker, or just to tell us what's missing. Say whichever applies.