About Bookatello

Bookatello is exactly one person, in Ontario, Canada: one desk, a laptop, and a couple of years of writing puzzle-generation software.

It started because the puzzle books I kept buying for my family kept having mistakes in them. An unsolvable sudoku is a small thing. It is also the whole evening, ruined, for someone who was looking forward to it — and it’s the single most common complaint about this entire category.

Why a machine makes them

I don’t draw these by hand, and that is the point rather than an apology. A person checking ten thousand sudoku by hand would make mistakes. A program that refuses to publish a puzzle it can’t re-solve from an empty grid does not.

What I build by hand is the machinery: the generators that build the grids, the solvers that grade them, and the checks that destroy anything that isn’t right. Thousands of puzzles go in. Only the ones that survive the gate come out.

I don’t buy puzzle files from anyone, and nothing here is scraped off another site. How it works, in detail

A quiet website, on purpose

You get the page you asked for. There is no advertising here, nothing that follows you to other websites, and nothing that jumps in front of what you came to read. The printables are yours without an email address, and if you do give me one it stays with me — never sold, shared or rented.

Write to me

hello@bookatello.com — I read it and I answer it, usually within a couple of days. Puzzle errors especially: title, page number, puzzle number, and I’ll re-run the checker on that exact one.