- Various customised picture books for children can be produced and purchased online.
- The finished picture book is the only one in the world in which children are the main characters.
- This service was made possible by establishing a fully automated system from ordering to delivery.
The personalised picture book "BÜKI" introduced here is a service that creates the world's only original picture book for children. For example, if you want to celebrate a birthday, you can enter the child's birthday and order online a beautiful picture book depicting animals related to constellations and the night sky on the day of birth. The service won the grand prize in the BabyTech® Award Japan 2021 Commemoration and Recording category. The BabyTech.jp editorial team therefore interviewed Fukumi Kozlob, CEO of STUDIO BUKI Corporation
(titles below omitted), the developer of BÜKI, to find out more about the service, how it was developed and what the future holds.
We spoke with...
Mr Fukumi Kozlov, CEO, STUDIO BUKI Corporation
A picture book is born, customised for that child, in real time, on the internet!
Editor: Thank you very much for your time today. Can you quickly give us an overview of BÜKI and its features?
Kozlov: ' BÜKI' is a personalised picture book in which children can become the protagonists of the story. By entering your child's name and birthday on our website, you can create a picture book in which your child becomes the hero of the story. You can also try out the book on the website and customise it in various ways, such as adding a message or photo to each page. In this way, the service allows you to create and purchase a one-of-a-kind picture book.
Editor: So you can try out all the pages of the picture book you' ve created as you go!
Kozlov: Customisations, such as changing the message, are reflected on the spot, so you can see a finished version of all the pages before you buy. BÜKI is a service that allows you to create your own original picture book, but most of them are at the level of the child's name in a few places, such as the main character's name or the title of the book. The immersion in the picture book is very different because it reflects real information.
Editor: When you tried to make a BÜKI to test it out, there were various fields for entering information, and this information was to be reflected in the picture book?
Kozlov: For example, let's say your child's birthday is 26 August. In a birthday-themed picture book, the background would be illustrated in summer because the season of birth is summer. The story begins the day before the birthday, with various characters baking a cake and handing out birthday party invitations, which can be changed to 'dinosaurs', 'animals' or other characters according to the child's preferences. There is also a picture book called ......, which determines the star sign from the birthday and is guided by the character of that sign. A particularly popular customisation is the scene at the end of one picture book where the characters look at the starry sky. The starry sky is recreated from open source data of the actual starry sky as seen from the child's birth date, birth time and birth location. In other picture books, the illustrations depicting the scene at the time of the child's birth change to night or morning depending on the time of day.
