The best present for your best mate, your partner, the group, mum, your sister, the lads, your golf buddies is already in your phone.
Your WhatsApp chat, retold as a story. Not a transcript. Every message is read, the moments worth keeping are picked out, and chapters are written around them, with your own messages inside. £9 for the digital copy, read it today. £49 printed and bound.
- The export file stays on your phone.
- Whatever is sent is locked in your browser first.
- The key lives only in your link, never with us.
How it works
From your phone to their hands, start to finish.
Seven steps. You are in control at every one of them, and you see the whole book before a page is printed.
The digital copy
£9, and it comes off the hardcover.
- 1
Export the chat
Two minutes
Six taps in WhatsApp. Choose “with media” if you want the photographs in the book. The file lands on your phone.
See the six taps → - 2
Hand it over and pick a voice
One minute
The export file never leaves your device. It’s locked in your browser, and only the messages inside it are sent. Then you choose the voice it’s written in: dry, warm, savage or tender. That’s your part done.
- 3
It reads the lot and writes the book
£9
What a good editor would do, if a good editor could read six years of messages in a quarter of an hour. It works out where one era of the group ends and the next begins. It spots the running joke nobody can explain any more, the night everything changed, the moments worth keeping among the thousands that aren’t. Then it writes the chapters around them, in the voice you chose, with your own messages printed word for word. The reading is done by AI, and only by AI. Nobody here can open your chat. The finished book is yours the same day, and yours to change.
The hardcover
£49, less the £9 you’ve paid, plus the delivery you choose.
- 4
You order the hardcover
£40 more
The book you have just read, printed and bound. Extra copies are £35 each in the same print run.
- 5
You read it and change anything
Take as long as you like
Click any message to take it out. Cut a photo, a whole moment, or a person who’d rather not be in it. Change the title, add a dedication. Nothing is printed and nothing is final.
- 6
You approve it
When you’re ready
That exact file goes to the printer, word for word as you left it. Nobody here opens it. Changes close at this point, and you get an email when it’s posted.
- 7
Printed, bound and posted
About three weeks in all
Two to three days on the press: a 7 × 10 in hardcover, full colour, up to 100 pages, your photographs at full resolution. Then tracked to your door, or ten to fourteen days start to finish if you pick express.
The hardcover
Order the hardcover, and this is what arrives.
Not ready to print? The digital copy is the same book, every chapter, photo and stat, to read on screen today for £9. Add the hardcover whenever you like and the £9 comes off the £49.
Our first copy off the press, photographed at home. It’s Steven’s own family chat, so no customer’s messages are on show.
See some examples →The digital copy
£9 gets you the finished thing, not a preview.
Every chapter, every photograph, every stat, written from your own messages, usually inside twenty minutes. Have it bound as a hardcover if you want to give it, and the £9 comes off the price.
The forgotten bits
The bits you’d forgotten are the best bits.
Who replies fastest, the running joke nobody can explain, the 2am era, the longest silence and what broke it, and the photos you both forgot you sent.
Who these are for
Every chat tells a different story.
Every message is read, the chat is sorted into chapters, and the writing goes around the messages themselves. What comes out depends entirely on who was talking.
The family group
A parent's sixtieth, a move, a year nobody wants to forget
The one with everyone in it, going since somebody set it up years ago. Birthdays, hospital runs, the endless debate about what time to arrive. It reads like nothing while you're in it, and like your whole family when it's written down.
Read The Family →The group chat
Ten years of it, and nobody has read a word back
The friends you've had longest. The running joke nobody can explain any more, the plans that never happened, the night that got out of hand. Everyone in it gets a copy and everyone finds a different page to argue about.
Read Tour Committee →The two of you
An anniversary, or just because
Every message since the first one, when neither of you was trying to be charming and both of you were. Two-person chats get their own pages: who says it first, who replies faster, the words only you two use.
Read Us Two →The trip
The one you still talk about
Booked in a group chat, survived in a group chat, retold in a group chat ever since. The spreadsheet, the flight everyone nearly missed, the photographs nobody ever put anywhere. One book, a copy each.
Read Gran's Lot →Every one of those is a whole book, free to read, made the same way yours would be. They were written from chats we invented, because no customer’s messages go on this website.
The four voices
The same afternoon, told four ways. Pick the one that sounds like you.
A real chapter opening from one of our own sample books. Your messages are always printed word for word. The voice only changes the writing around them.
Affectionate and a little sentimental. For anniversaries, birthdays and couples.
Chapter four
The Gazebo Incident
Some summers are remembered for the weather, and some are remembered for the day the gazebo tried to fly away. This one started ordinarily enough. Everyone converging on the garden, the spread laid out, Sue proud of it all. Then the wind got involved.
What followed was chaos, then relief, then the kind of laughter that only comes after everyone's confirmed to be fine. By the next morning it was already a story being retold, a bit of a nightmare, but one everybody had a laugh about in the end.
The Day the Gazebo Went Down
It had been swaying all afternoon before it finally gave in.
Suebeautiful spread right?
Robgazebo's looking a bit dodgy in this wind
Joshyeah mate it's swaying
SueOH MY GOD
SueTHE GAZEBO'S DOWN
Joshis everyone ok???
Robwe're all fine just got a face full of canvas lol
Suenan's pavlova went flying
Kateis she alright?
Sueshe's fine just a bit shook up. laughing about it actually
Robleast everyone had a laugh about it in the end
From one of our own sample books, so no customer’s chat is on show. The messages are printed exactly as they were sent.
The hardcover
£75£49
Written, printed and bound. In your hands in about three weeks.
- £9
- the digital copy, read on screen today: every chapter, your photographs and the stats. It comes off the £49.
- £35
- each extra copy, printed in the same run.
- £4.95
- delivery, second class. Tracked £6.95, express £14.95.
- £75
- what the hardcover costs from 1 January.
Every hardcover gives
£10 from every hardcover goes to Room to Read.
They teach children to read across Asia and Africa, and publish children’s books in local languages, because a child can’t learn to read in a language they don’t speak, and there’s often nothing to read in the one they do. A business built on words being worth keeping ought to help put books in the hands of children who have none.
Why this project exists →Who makes this
A small London shop, not a factory.
Thread & Bound is run by Steven Fine in London. It started with one family group chat, six years long, that nobody was ever going to read again. Every book is written by the same system, whoever it is for, and no one here reads your chat to do it.
Questions go straight to hello@threadandbound.com.
What you get
- 7 × 10 in hardcover, casewrap, full colour throughout
- Up to 100 pages, so it stays a book you’d read in an evening
- Your photos printed at 300 dots per inch, checked one by one
- Your messages word for word, with a page of who’s who and the group awards
- Printed and bound to order by a book printer that works for publishers
Before you ask
Can anyone at Thread & Bound read my chat?
No. Your chat is locked on your phone before it’s sent, with a key that only exists in your private link. We don’t keep that key, so we can’t open your messages, photos or drafts. There’s no admin screen and no staff read-through: you’re the only editor.
Is this just my chat printed out?
No. A few years of messages runs to well over a thousand pages and reads like a phone bill. We pick the moments worth keeping, write the chapters around them, and print your own messages word for word.
Does it work for any chat?
Any WhatsApp chat exported from an iPhone: the group with your mates, a couple’s thread, you and your sister, a family group. Two-person chats get their own pages, like who replies faster and who says it first.
What about the other people in the chat?
Ask them. The messages belong to everyone who wrote them, and getting their say-so is your job, not ours: you tick to confirm that before you upload. You read and edit the whole book first, so you can take out any message, photo or person who’d rather not be in it.
Where do my messages go?
The export stays on your phone or computer. Only the chat’s text and the photos your book uses are sent, locked. To write the book, Claude, Anthropic’s AI, reads the text. Anthropic doesn’t train on it and deletes it within 30 days. When you approve the finished book, it goes straight to our printer.
How long do you keep it?
Until you don’t need it. Delete everything from your book’s page at any time. Otherwise a book you don’t order is deleted after 30 days, and a printed one 30 days after it ships.
What if I lose my link?
We email it to you once, when you start. We can’t send a new one: without the key in that link, nobody can open the book, including us.
Private by design
Nobody at Thread & Bound can read your chat.
A promise we will always keep, and one the whole thing is built around. There is no screen here that shows your messages, because there is no way for us to unlock them.
What we can see
- Your name and email
- Your delivery address, once you order
- How far along your book is
- What you paid
What we can’t see
- A single message
- Any of your photos
- A word of your chapters
- The finished book
Your chat is locked on your phone with a key that lives in your private link, in the part after the # that browsers never send to a website. Steal our whole database and you get unreadable files.
The anniversary is in three months. This takes an evening.
The digital copy is £9, read it today. The hardcover is £49, in your hands in about three weeks.