BookCloud

A love of reading, for every child

Children's stories in your family's languages — read aloud.

Real books and library shelves come first — but the shelves near you don't always hold every language your family speaks, or travel with you. BookCloud fills those gaps: a calm, ad-free children's library of openly-licensed and public-domain stories, read aloud, in language after language.

We made BookCloud for our own family — two parents, three languages. It's free, and you're welcome to it too.

Download on the App Store
The BookCloud app open at 'The Tale of Two Bad Mice' by Beatrix Potter — its cover, the languages it can be read and heard in, and 'Read together' and 'Read to me' buttons

  • An open library: Openly-licensed and public-domain stories, credited to their makers

  • Made to read together: Calm, ad-free, safe — read-aloud for when you can't read along

  • Free, on iOS and Android: No ads, no price — just a quiet place to read

What's inside

A simple reading app for parents and children, everywhere.

The things parents told us mattered most — and a few quieter ones we wouldn't ship without.

Bilingual & multilingual, read aloud

Every story, in your languages — read aloud.

Add the languages your family lives in and switch a book between them, page for page — a library that's growing language by language. It makes any story bilingual or dual-language: the same illustrated tale, in language after language as you switch. Most stories come with warm, expressive narration, so your child can listen as they read.

  • The same illustrated story across each of your languages.
  • Read-aloud narration, in language after language.

Built on openly-licensed stories from non-profit publishers like StoryWeaver (Pratham Books).

'Raju's First Flight' in the BookCloud app, listing the nine languages it can be read in — most with a read-aloud audio marker — and 'Read together' and 'Read to me' buttons
'Alice in Wonderland' in the BookCloud app — its age band, the languages it's available in, and an 'About this book' panel crediting the text, illustration and narration as AI-assisted, under the open CC BY 4.0 licence

Safe by design

Vetted, sorted by age, and calm.

Every book is read before it joins the library and sorted by the age it's really for. Older tales are gently retold so they're right for young readers — in a calm, ad-free space, and we're open about how every edition is made.

  • Every story read and sorted by age before it's added.
  • Classic tales gently retold to suit young readers.
  • Each book credits its makers and shows what was AI-assisted.

Parental controls

You decide what they can open.

Build each child's shelf by age, topic and language — leave a row open to allow everything. The parent area lives behind a PIN, so the settings stay yours.

  • Whitelist the exact ages, themes and languages a child can browse.
  • A PIN-gated parent area for settings and profiles.
  • Hand the phone over locked to BookCloud — using your device's own Guided Access (iOS) or screen pinning (Android) — so time on their own stays a calm reading space, not a doorway to other apps.
The BookCloud parent area — choosing which ages, topics and languages a child can browse, narrowing the library to a chosen few books

A non-feature, on purpose

No points. No streaks. No autoplay.

Nothing here is engineered to keep your child in the app. It opens to a story and it's easy to put down — that's the point, not a flaw.

Full-bleed pages and big, friendly type — and a layout that adapts to phone, tablet, portrait or landscape.

A full-bleed page from 'The Three Little Pigs' in BookCloud — the illustration fills the screen with the words in a caption above
'The Three Little Pigs' in BookCloud turned landscape — the illustration beside the text The BookCloud library on a tablet — a wide grid of illustrated children's books
A child's profile in BookCloud — favourite books, reading time, languages read and gentle milestones

A profile for each child

Each child, their own shelf.

Every child gets their own profile — their favourites, the languages they're reading in, and the milestones that actually matter: re-reading a book they love, trying a new kind of story, reading in another language, and reading it together with you. We mark depth and curiosity, never streaks or scores. It's a keepsake for you, not a leaderboard for them.

Questions, answered

A few things parents ask.

Is BookCloud free?

Yes — BookCloud is free, with no ads and no price. There's nothing to buy, and nothing engineered to keep your child in the app.

What languages does BookCloud support?

The library is growing language by language. Right now there are stories in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Italian, Urdu, Traditional Chinese and Chichewa — not every book in every language yet, with more added as we translate and narrate them.

Can the same story be read aloud in two languages?

Not at the same time — there's no side-by-side view. You switch the whole book from one language to another, and each page is read aloud in the language you've chosen, as long as that language has been narrated (some languages have text but no audio yet). So you might read it in one language today and another tomorrow.

Are the books safe and age-appropriate?

Every book goes through a classification step that flags unsafe themes — things like violence, death, frightening or scary imagery, cruelty, exclusion and abandonment. Depending on what's found, a book is either left out of the library, gently adapted for younger readers, or placed in an older age band. It's a calm, ad-free space with no points, streaks or autoplay, and each book credits its makers.

Is BookCloud on iOS and Android?

BookCloud is on the App Store now, and free. Google Play is coming soon — get in touch and we'll let you know the moment the Android app is ready.