bookshelf.kids Terms, Privacy & Photo Notice

1. Who may use bookshelf.kids

Accounts, purchases, memberships, photo consent, delivery details and sharing decisions must be made by a person aged 18 or older. A child may sit alongside you and help make the book, but the account is the adult’s and an adult remains responsible for every choice and submission made on it.

2. Source photos and consent

Uploading a photo is optional and a book can be made without one. If you upload one, you confirm that you are the parent, legal guardian, or otherwise have lawful permission from every pictured person.

A photo is held temporarily in server memory. It is never written to our database and never saved into the book. It is sent to our illustration provider to make one drawing — the character sheet the rest of the book is drawn from — and released the moment that drawing is locked; every later page is drawn from that drawing rather than from the photo. In any case it is released after all permitted uses or after approximately 30 minutes, whichever happens first.

If you save someone to My family, what is saved is the drawing we made of them, together with the name, relationship and age you typed. The photo it was drawn from is not saved.

3. Generated book storage

Generated illustrations may resemble the submitted people. Unlike source photos, book pages, story text, narration settings, generated illustrations and any narration audio are retained in the account so the owner can read the book later. Books are read in your account on this site; there is no download.

Deleting a book, deleting your account or asking us to delete it will remove the retained bookshelf.kids copies, subject to legal, fraud-prevention and backup obligations. Purchase records are kept in anonymised form where tax, accounting or fraud-prevention law requires it.

4. Automated generation and its limits

The service writes and illustrates the story automatically. Automated generation can make factual, artistic, spelling, continuity or likeness mistakes. Preview the pages carefully. bookshelf.kids applies technical and prompt guardrails, but no automated safety system is perfect. Do not submit confidential data, addresses, schools, surnames, medical facts or information unnecessary for the story.

Your child’s real name is not sent to the service that writes or draws the book: it is replaced with a placeholder and put back in your own browser. It is sent to the text-to-speech service when narration is made, because the narrator has to say it out loud.

5. Safety and prohibited content

Profanity, sexual material, exploitation, hate, self-harm, graphic violence, illegal activity, bullying and attempts to bypass safety systems are prohibited. bookshelf.kids may reject prompts, suspend accounts or remove shared books that breach these rules. A Bible adventure retells the selected scriptural account: the child may imaginatively witness it, but cannot replace a biblical person, perform a miracle or change the account’s events, message or outcome.

Every generated page carries a report control. If anything the service produces is inappropriate, report it from the page itself and we will review it and act on the report. Child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) material is prohibited without exception; we act on reports, remove offending content, terminate the accounts responsible and report to the competent authorities where the law requires it. Our child-safety contact is hello@bookshelf.kids.

6. Story languages and narration

A story can be written in any of the languages offered in the creator, and the output is automatically generated: it may contain grammatical, idiomatic or spelling errors in any of them, including English. The site’s own wording is translated into a smaller set of languages than the books are; the two lists are not the same thing, and where a page is not translated it is shown in English.

Read-aloud narration is produced by a text-to-speech service and is available in every language a book can be written in except Irish, Bosnian and Maltese. A book written in one of those three has no read-aloud: the creator says so on the language card before you choose it, and the reader offers no read-aloud for that book. Pronunciation, accent and voice quality vary by language, and the sample you can play in the creator is an example sentence, not your book.

7. Preview, payment and page rewrites

You write the book first and pay afterwards. Before payment the cover and the first three story pages are shown with a visible bookshelf.kids watermark, and only the artwork for those pages is made. Payment unlocks the whole book: the remaining pages, the remaining illustrations — which are made after payment and take a few minutes to appear — and the read-aloud.

After payment you can ask for an individual page to be rewritten. A rewrite may change that page’s words and its artwork, and the previous version is replaced. Page rewrites do not count against a membership allowance; asking for a whole new story does, because it is a new story.

Read-aloud narration is included with every book at no extra charge, in the languages section 6 describes.

8. Memberships and allowances

Membership runs Silver then Gold. Both tiers let you read the books other families have shared in the public library, and both include a number of books per calendar month — the number is stated on the pricing section and in your account, and it may be uncapped. Allowances count stories that were generated, including a story you asked to be written again, and they do not roll over from one month to the next. Once a month’s allowance is used, further books are still made; they are simply bought one at a time, as they are without a membership.

Membership is billed monthly, or yearly at a discount stated at the checkout, and recurs until cancelled. Cancelling stops the billing and does not take away the time you have already paid for: the membership runs to the end of the period it is paid up to. If a recurring payment stops arriving, the membership ends when the paid-up period does. Prices and reasonable usage limits may change with advance notice.

Where a membership or digital book is bought inside the bookshelf.kids Android app, the purchase is processed by Google Play and is managed, renewed and cancelled through your Google Play account. Deleting your bookshelf.kids account does not cancel a Google Play subscription.

9. Prices, currency and payment

Prices are shown in one currency per visitor, chosen from the country you tell us you are in or, failing that, from where the request appears to come from, and the currency you are shown is the currency you are charged in. Amounts are worked out on our servers; your browser never calculates a price.

Payment is taken by our payment provider on their own page. We never see or store your card details, and a book, membership or printed order is unlocked only once that provider confirms to us that the payment succeeded — or, where store credit or a discount covers the price in full, once there is nothing left to charge.

10. Printed books, approval and delivery

Printed formats are offered only in the countries we ship to, so the options you see depend on where you are. Ordering a printed copy of a book that has not been unlocked yet unlocks the digital book as well and is priced accordingly; if the digital book has already been paid for, its price comes off the printed order.

A printed order needs a delivery address and a contactable phone number, and both are required before the order can be placed. You may correct the address from your shelf up until the order is sent to the printer, and not after that — by then the pack, including the address, is with them. Two approvals are needed before anything is printed: yours, approving the design as it will be printed, and ours, releasing it to the printer. Nothing is printed from a book you have not approved, so an order will wait indefinitely until you approve it.

Delivery estimates are not guarantees. Defective printed products will be handled under applicable South African consumer law.

11. Sharing a book, and the reward for it

You may add a book you have unlocked to the public library, where other members can read it. A book that has not been paid for cannot be shared. Sharing is optional, you can stop sharing a book at any time, and an unshared book stops being readable by anyone else.

Adding a book to the public library credits your account with a fixed reward, stated on the share button and in your account in your own currency. It is store credit, not cash: it accumulates, it comes off the total at your next checkout, it may be applied only to a digital book, it cannot be transferred or paid out, and it may be withdrawn if the shared book is removed for a rules violation.

We may feature a shared book on the homepage as an example. Un-sharing removes it from there too, with nothing further for you to do.

12. Discount codes and invitation codes

A discount code may be typed at the checkout. Codes can be limited in how many times they may be used in total and per account, can expire, and can be restricted to books or to memberships. A code applies to the order it is typed on; a code that reduces a membership reduces every renewal of it, and a code that has lapsed by the time you pay is simply not applied.

Another member’s invitation code may be typed in the same box. It attributes your account to them and takes a stated percentage off your first book order — sometimes nothing at all, if we are running the invitation without a discount. A discount code and an invitation code do not stack: if you type a discount code, that is the one that applies.

13. Inviting other families

Where the invitation programme is switched on, you can invite other families with a link or a code and earn a share of what they spend. Commission is earned on the person you invited and on no one further, is recorded in US dollars and is quoted to you in your own currency.

You can ask to be paid out what you have earned, subject to a stated minimum and to limits on how much may be paid out over a period. Your balance is reduced when you ask, not when we pay; if we decline a request the amount goes back onto your balance. Store credit earned by sharing a book is not commission and cannot be paid out. We may withhold or reverse commission on payments that are refunded, reversed or obtained in breach of these terms, and self-referral does not earn anything.

The person who invited you is told your name, the email address you signed up with, the date you joined, whether each purchase was a book or a membership payment, and the commission it earned them. They are never told what you paid, which book you made, its title, or anything about the child in it. If you would rather not appear on their list, ask us and we will detach your account from the invitation.

14. Emails we send you

We email you about your account and your orders. We also send two automatic messages: a reminder about a book you wrote and did not unlock, which may carry a discount code, and — once ever, a few days after your first purchase — a request for a review. Every one of those carries an unsubscribe link that stops both, and using it does not affect your account or your books. The newsletter box in the footer is a separate list you can leave the same way.

15. Ownership and permissions

You keep rights you hold in your submitted story idea and lawful photos. You grant bookshelf.kids the limited permission needed to process them and fulfil the order, and — for a book you choose to share — to make it readable by other members and to feature it as an example. You receive personal-use rights to the book you bought. You may not impersonate others, use photos without consent, resell platform assets or remove preview watermarks.

16. Accounts, refunds and cancellation

Keep login credentials private. Generation begins immediately and may limit cancellation rights once work has started. You can delete your account yourself at any time at bookshelf.kids/account/delete. Deleting an account removes its books and personal details; the financial record of what was bought is kept, without the details identifying you, for as long as the law requires. Payment and delivery policies applying to the transaction are presented again at the payment gateway.

17. Privacy choices and contact

You may request access to, correction of or deletion of account data by emailing hello@bookshelf.kids, or delete your account yourself at bookshelf.kids/account/delete. bookshelf.kids will use reasonable security controls, minimise collected data and notify affected users where required by law. This notice should be reviewed by South African legal counsel before commercial launch.