The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home is a new children’s book from the team behind Lost My Name, a personalised children’s book with pages customised to the letters in your daughter or son or nephew or niece’s name. The new book takes things to the next level, though, with pages showing a satellite image of your kid’s street address.
Lost My Name is a publishing startup backed by Google Ventures, with over 1,600,000 customised books sold in 175 countries. Its first title was Lost My Name, but The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home launched last week — and among other things, it uses something called density wave theory to map your kid’s name in a unique star constellation on one of the book’s pages.
The books cost $39.99 each with free shipping, and include the option for a personalised dedication at the start of the book, a storyline customised to your child’s name (in the case of Lost My Name) or home address (in the case of The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home), and other tweaks like your country’s national flag and a famous landmark.
The UK-based team includes author David Cadji-Newby and illustrator Pedro Serapicos, as well as the team of developers that worked on the website and design process. Lost My Name calls itself a “full-stack” business — in the same breath as Apple and Uber and Netflix — where it controls the entire process from story creation to printing to marketing and sales and book deliveries.
The experience is different for every child as aspects of the storyline and imagery are personalised based upon where they actually live — from the country flag on the spaceship, and the view of Earth from outer space, to seeing familiar landmarks as the adventure gets closer to its conclusion where the child returns to their actual home address.
The story is further brought vividly to life utilising NASA’s open source photography of outer space, and mapping technologies that enable a close-up flyby of the child’s actual neighbourhood and landmarks near their house! The friends’ venture through the ocean and onwards toward their continent, their city, their neighbourhood, their street and finally their home address, with the child’s own bedroom as the last stop of the journey.