How a Data Engineer Ended Up Making Storybooks | MyOwnChildbook

It started with a birthday cake.

For my little boy’s birthday, I used AI to put him on a tractor and had the picture printed on top of his cake. I will never forget his face when he leaned in to blow out the candles. That smile did something to me. He was not looking at a cartoon of some boy. He was looking at himself, doing the thing he loved most.

I am a data engineer by training. I spend my days in pipelines, edge cases and the unglamorous work of making systems behave. Making children’s books was not the plan. But I could not forget that smile, and I kept thinking: what if a whole story could feel like that?

So I made one. A full book about tractors, for the same boy. My background made the hard part easy, turning a loose idea into a working script, and that script into a complete book printed on premium paper with a proper hardcover. The first version came together in a few weeks. Then I spent the year after that improving it, step by step. That became MijnEigenBoekje.

From one language to three

For a while it was a small, personal thing here in the Netherlands. A year later, an email landed from Cloudprinter, a Dutch company that prints and ships worldwide, asking if I wanted to work with them. Something about it just clicked. Why not?

I already made the books in more than one language, so going global was a smaller step than it sounds, but the reach was not. Suddenly there were far more parents and children out there who could be surprised by a book, and maybe nudged towards reading. We launched in English as MyOwnChildbook, and in German too. Three languages, one simple idea: every child should be the hero of their own story.

Going international taught me something the data never could. A bedtime is a bedtime in every language. The name changes, the words change, but the moment a child recognises themselves on the page is exactly the same in Rotterdam, Manchester or Munich.

Built by a customer, not just a founder

Because I am a customer of this kind of product myself, MyOwnChildbook is built around the things that used to annoy me.

You see clear pricing from the start. There are no strangely cheap books that turn out to be the size of your hand, the kind you cannot read without a magnifying glass. There is no surcharge for a hardcover, because a personalised book should feel like a keepsake, not a flyer. And you are not charged simply to create a book. You pay for the computing power that actually makes it, so you can see what you are paying for, and you never pay for a PDF you will never read aloud.

I am also honest about the tool. AI is not perfect and it can make mistakes. If you do not like the result, you can try again, or discard the book entirely and come back a year later, when I will have improved the whole creation pipeline again.

Not a gift machine

Here is the part people sometimes miss. This is not a machine where you press a button and AI does the work for you. The best books, the ones children actually keep, come from parents who pour their own creativity and their knowledge of their child into them. Your input is what makes it personal, and personal is what makes it memorable.

A little while ago I sat down with Tech Times for a conversation about why a child should not just appear in a book, but belong in the story. That sentence is more or less the whole philosophy in one line.

A spark, not a replacement

Let me be honest about what this is. A personalised book costs more than a paperback from the shop, because each one is printed to order for a single child. It is shaped by your ideas and generated with AI, and you check and approve every page yourself before anything is printed. But neither you nor the AI is a professional writer, so a book like this will not match the writing style or the educational value of a story crafted by a real children’s author.

So please do not replace your whole bookshelf with personalised books. The craft of professional authors and illustrators is something to treasure, and no custom book replaces it.

What a book like this does well is give a child a spark. Seeing yourself as the hero is often the thing that turns reading from a chore into something exciting. Use it for that. And then keep it. Put it away somewhere safe, because one day that child will be grown, will open it again, and will say, “ah yes, that was me, I looked like that, I was crazy about dinosaurs and my little bear.” That is the part you cannot buy twice.

Still the same moment

Years and three languages later, the thing that keeps me going is the same one that started it. Not the pipelines, not the growth, but a boy leaning over a cake, grinning at a tractor, because for once the picture was about him.

If you would like to make something like that, you can create a personalised children’s book where your own child is the hero.