What we collect
We collect the minimum a bookmaker needs, and nothing that a bookmaker doesn’t:
- Your account: an email address. That’s the whole account — we use six-digit sign-in codes, so there is no password to store.
- What you write for a character: an age, an optional first name, and an optional short description in your own words (“curly hair, obsessed with excavators”). The form has no field for a last name, a birthday, or an address.
- Your commission: the lesson or story idea you type when you ask for a book, and any edits you make to the manuscript afterward.
There is nowhere in the product to put a photo of your child. This is not a setting you have to find: no screen accepts an image upload, and our database has no column to store one. Characters are drawn from the written description you give us.
What we generate and store
Making your book produces work product, and we keep it:
- Manuscripts — storyline pitches, page text, titles, dedications, and refrains, including your edits.
- Illustrations — character sheets, covers, and page art, including earlier versions you re-rolled past.
- Review verdicts — every manuscript is read by an independent editorial model, and we store its verdict and its critique. That review is a second opinion on craft, not a gate: it runs in the background, its suggestions reach you as optional edits you can apply or dismiss, and your book does not wait on it.
- An event log — a running record of each book’s progress (state changes, review verdicts, moderation flags, what each step cost us). It powers the progress screen you watch while your book is being made, and it is our audit trail if something goes wrong.
Which providers see what
We don’t run giant AI models in our own basement; a small number of providers help us make your book. Each one sees only what its job requires:
- The writing and reviewing models (Anthropic and OpenAI): story text — which can include your child’s first name, age, and the description you wrote — goes to the model that writes the manuscript and to a second, independent model that reviews it.
- The illustration models (OpenAI, and Google for print covers): receive written illustration prompts describing invented characters and scenes. Written prompts are all they get, because written prompts are all we hold.
- Narration (ElevenLabs): when you create a read-aloud share, the book’s page text goes to ElevenLabs to be turned into audio. Text only — no account details, nothing you wrote about a character.
- Printing (Lulu): when you order a printed copy, Lulu receives the finished book files and the delivery name, address, and contact phone you enter at checkout — what a printer needs to make and ship your book, nothing more.
- Email delivery (Resend): your email address, to send sign-in codes, “your book is ready” notes, and print-order updates.
- Payments: during early access, checkout is a preview — no card is charged and no card details are collected. When real purchases launch, a payment processor (Stripe) handles your card directly; what comes back to us is a record that a purchase happened.
Our infrastructure (application hosting and database) is provided by Vercel and Neon, which store the data described on this page on our behalf.
We advertise, and advertising involves measurement. Rather than summarize that here in a sentence you’d have to take on faith, we describe it item by item under Cookies and tracking below — which tools run, what each one receives, and what is held back from all of them.
And us: when you report a problem we can’t reproduce, a named person here can open your account and see it as you see it. It is limited to the addresses listed in our operations settings, a reason is recorded every time, the session ends on its own, and it can read your account but not change it, spend from it, or buy anything with it.
How long we keep things
- Your books — manuscripts, art, audio, PDFs — are kept until you delete them. They’re yours; we don’t expire them.
- Moderation and abuse records — declined commissions, moderation flags, review failures — are kept for 90 days so we can investigate misuse, then purged down to anonymous aggregate counts.
Deleting your data
You can delete an individual book, a character you created, or your whole account. We remove the associated information from Fable Designer’s active services. Our infrastructure providers may retain limited backup copies temporarily under their standard retention schedules.
Shipping addresses
When you order a printed copy of your book, we ask for a shipping address at order time only — nothing asks for one earlier, and it lives on that order and nowhere else. While Lulu calculates your exact price, the address stays in your browser; only after you approve the order do we save it on that order’s record and share it with Lulu, our printer, so they can print and deliver your book. It is used for nothing else.
The tablet reading app
Books can be read on a tablet through our reading app, which is a companion to your account rather than a second place to sign in. There is no account in the app and no password: on your shelf you generate a code, an adult types it into the tablet once, and that code is exchanged for a token stored on the tablet. The token identifies that tablet, not a person, and the pairing screen is the only place in the app where anything can be typed at all.
Each time the tablet opens its shelf, it records the time it last did so. You see that on your own shelf as a date — the tablet last opened on the 8th — and it is the only thing the tablet reports back to us. To keep someone from guessing codes, the pairing step also counts recent attempts against a hashed form of the requesting network address rather than a stored one.
The reading screens load no advertising or analytics code. The measurement tools described elsewhere in this policy run on the website only, and the reading surfaces sit outside where they are mounted.
Removing the tablet from your shelf revokes its token, and the app stops loading books with it. Books and narration already downloaded to the tablet stay on the tablet, and read there without a connection.
Cookies and tracking
A few things run in your browser: the session cookie that keeps you signed in, Google Analytics, which we use to count visits and see which steps of making a book people reach, and the Meta (Facebook) Pixel, which shares visit and conversion events with Meta so we can measure and target advertising. The events we send any of these tools are steps, buttons, and product choices — ids, labels, and listed prices. Your child’s name, age, and description stay out of them, as do your book and guidance text — and neither tool loads at all on the read-aloud share pages or in the reader app, so a share’s secret address is not part of what is sent. Deeper operational measurement stays in our server-side event and generation logs (described above).
If you arrived from an ad, the link you clicked carried labels naming which ad it was — the platform, the campaign, and the version of our pitch it showed you. Google Analytics collects those labels so we can tell which ads bring people who go on to make a book they love. The labels describe the advertisement, not you.
Children’s privacy
Fable Designer is a service for adults. Accounts are held by parents and guardians (18+) who commission books on behalf of a child. There is no sign-up and no sign-in for a child to use: on the website every screen that accepts text sits behind the account holder’s sign-in, and in the tablet app the only thing that can be typed is the pairing code an adult enters once. When a child reads on a paired tablet, what that produces is the last-opened time described above, which only the account holder sees. The small amount of child-related information we hold (age, optional first name, optional description) comes from the guardian, is used only to make their books, and is deleted on request as described above.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that matters — new data collected, a new provider, a different retention period — we’ll update the date at the top and tell accountholders by email before the change takes effect.
How to reach us
Questions, deletion requests we can help with, or anything that worries you: support@fabledesigner.com. A person reads it. The service is operated by Fable Designer LLC, a Massachusetts limited liability company.
See also our Terms of Service.