About this project
The longest thing you have ever written is a group chat, and nobody will ever read it.
A six-year chat runs longer than most novels. It has everything in it. The good week, the awful one, the joke nobody outside it would understand. And not one word of it will be read again. It is the only thing we make that is designed to be scrolled past.
How it started
With one family group chat, six years long. Everything else from those years had somewhere to live: the photographs had an album, the cards were in a drawer, the good news was framed. The chat, which was where most of it actually happened , had nowhere at all.
So the first book was made from that chat, to find out whether it would work. It did. People read it properly, start to finish, the way you read a book and not the way you scroll. That is the whole idea: not a printout of a chat, but a written book with the chat inside it.
Who makes it
Thread & Bound is run by Steven Fine in London. It is one person and a very careful system. Not a factory, and not a team of editors reading other people’s messages.
That last part was a decision, not an accident. Chats hold the most private things people have. So the system was built so that nobody here can read yours: your chat is locked on your own device before it is sent, with a key that only exists in your private link, and we never hold a copy of that key. There is no screen at this end that shows your messages. Here is exactly who sees what.
Where £10 goes
£10 from every hardcover goes to Room to Read.
Room to Read works across Asia and Africa on two things: teaching children to read, and keeping girls in education. They publish children’s books in local languages, because a child cannot learn to read in a language they do not speak, and there is often nothing to read in the one they do. In 2025 they report reaching 17 million children and their communities.
The fit is not a coincidence. This is a business built on the idea that words are worth keeping and worth reading. It seems only right that a tenner from every one goes to putting books in the hands of children who have none.
A flat £10 a book, not a share of something you have no way of checking. It comes out of what the book makes, whatever that turns out to be, and we publish the total each year.
What it costs, and why
£9 for the digital copy and £49 to have it printed and bound, with the £9 coming off. The hardcover is 7 × 10 inches, full colour throughout, up to 100 pages, printed to order by a book printer that works for publishers. Delivery is chosen at the checkout and never hidden inside the price.
Nothing is printed until you have read every page and said so. You can take out any message, any photograph, or any person who would rather not be in it.
Questions
They come straight to me: hello@threadandbound.com.
Start with your own chat.
£9 for the digital copy, read today. £49 printed and bound. £10 from every hardcover goes to Room to Read.