Name-personalized book

In a name-personalized book the story and the artwork are fixed, and the child's name is inserted into the text where it appears. Often a preset character can be chosen too - a handful of skin tones, hair colours and styles - so the illustrated child is picked from a menu rather than derived from a photograph.

This was the original form of the product and it is still the most common. Because the illustrations are drawn once and reused for every buyer, they can be made by a human artist to a high standard, which is a genuine advantage: the artwork in a good name-only book is often more polished than generated art.

The limitation is that the child is not in it. A five-year-old who is looking for themselves in the pictures will find a cartoon with roughly their hair, and most of them notice. That is fine when the gift is meant to be cheerful and fine when the child is very young, and it is the wrong choice when the point is recognition.

It is usually cheaper and faster, and both follow from the same cause. Nothing has to be generated per order, so the file is assembled quickly and production is closer to ordinary printing. For a class set, a party bag or a gift where budget matters more than depth, this is the sensible end of the market.

Age changes the calculation. Under three, the name is most of what registers and a preset character is entirely adequate. From about four or five, children start comparing the picture to themselves, and from that point a name-only book increasingly reads as a book about somebody else with their name on it.

The category is also sold as a name book, a personalised name story, or simply a personalised book, which is the term that covers both this and the photo-based kind. Alphabet and letter books, where each page is a letter of the name, are a distinct sub-genre of the same idea.