Guides to buying a book for a kid

The guides (4)

Three different things get sold as a "personalized" book

Name-swap, template and written-for-one-kid compared, and how to tell which you're buying

Six questions to ask before you buy an AI-made kids' book

Six questions worth asking any seller of AI-made books, with our answers beside them

Last-minute gifts for kids, sorted by days remaining

What still works at two weeks, at one week, and on the night before

What changes between 3 and 8, and what to give at each step

Age by age from 3 to 8: what shifts, and where a picture book fits

Start from where you're stuck

• Every shop says personalized and you can't tell what actually changes — What personalized means
• You saw an ad for an AI picture book and don't know what you'd be buying — Buying an AI-made book
• The date is close and nothing you can ship will arrive in time — Last-minute gifts
• You know the kid's age and nothing else about what they like — Gifts by age
• You already know the occasion and want the specifics — the occasion pages cover birthdays, Christmas, a new sibling and buying from a distance

What these guides do and don't claim

We sell one of the things these pages compare, so it's worth saying how they are written.

• No other shop's prices are quoted. Prices change whenever a competitor decides to change them, and a number printed here would be stale without anyone noticing. The comparisons are about what changes in the book, not about what it costs elsewhere.
• No customer counts, reviews or testimonials. We'd have to invent them, and a made-up number is worse than an empty space.
• Where we're a bad fit, the guides say so. A toddler is better served by a cheaper board book, and a gift needed tomorrow can't be written to order. Both are written down rather than skipped.
• The AI part is stated plainly. Our books are drafted by AI and finished by a human editor, and the guide on buying AI-made books asks the same questions of us that it asks of anyone else.

How ordering works

Three steps, and only the first one happens on this site.

• You pay $9.99 and tell us the child's name, age and whatever you want in the story on the payment page.
• You email two or three photos of them to info@kater.jp from the address you paid with. There's no upload form here.
• The finished book comes back to that address as a print-ready PDF within 7 business days. If we miss that, you get a full refund without asking.

One thing worth knowing before you count backwards from a date: we're in Japan, so business days here are Japanese weekdays. Weekends and Japanese public holidays don't count, and they don't fall on the same days as yours. How the 7 days are counted is written out on the refund page. If your date is tight, email us before you pay and we'll tell you whether it fits.