Terms of Use

Your Account

• You must be at least 13 years old. If the law where you live sets a higher age for agreeing to terms like these on your own, that age applies instead.
• An account is one person. Sign in with an email and password, with Apple, or with Google — whichever you use, keep it to yourself, and tell us if somebody else gets into it.
• Use a name your club will recognise. You do not have to use your legal name, but you may not take someone else's.

What You Write Stays Yours

Your notes, passages, closing words, voice notes and photographs belong to you. Posting them into a club gives us permission to store them and show them to the people you chose to show them to — the members of that club, the friend you handed a reading to — and to nobody else. We do not sell them, we do not put advertising against them, and we do not use them to train AI models. AI is used inside the app to make discussion guides and to sort a spoken note into the right kind of note; what that involves is written out in the Privacy Policy.

Quote a book as a reader quotes a book. Reproducing a substantial part of a copyrighted work — a chapter, a scanned edition — is not a note, and we will remove it.

The Kindle connector is a compatibility feature, not an official Amazon service. Use it only with a Kindle library you are authorized to read. It honors publisher export limits and will stop rather than bypass an Amazon sign-in challenge, access control, or an unknown Notebook layout.

What You May Not Post

There is no tolerance here for objectionable content or for abusive members. Do not post, send, or upload:

• Anything hateful, harassing, or demeaning toward a person or a group — on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or anything else
• Threats, intimidation, stalking, or encouragement of violence or self-harm
• Sexually explicit material — and never, in any form, sexual content involving a child
• Anything unlawful, or anything that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark, or privacy
• Another person's private information — an address, a phone number, a photograph of them — without their permission
• Spam, advertising, chain messages, scams, or bulk invitations
• Impersonation of another person, or of us
• Malware, scraping, or any attempt to break, overload, or get around the way the app works

Behaviour counts as much as content. Do not harass another member. Do not use an invitation, a club, or a reading you were handed as a way to reach somebody who does not want to hear from you. A club is somebody's living room.

When Somebody Breaks These Rules

• Report it. In the iPhone app, press and hold anything another member wrote and choose Report. On this website, press the Report button on the row — it is on notes and letters, replies, messages in the margin and the mantel, closing words, photographs, recordings, a reflection and the replies under it, and a club's own description in the directory. Either way it reaches us with a reference, so you do not have to describe what you saw.
• Wherever that button is not there yet, email [email protected]. The app carries Report on more places than the website does, and the website is catching up rather than finished — so rather than promise you a button on every screen, here is the address that works from any of them, needs no account, and reaches the same people. Say what you saw and where; we will find it.
• Hide them. Behind the same Report button, on the website and in the app, you can hide a member — their writing stops appearing on that device. Nothing is sent, nothing is stored on our side, and they are never told. It is a preference, not an accusation, and you can undo it from the same place, where their writing used to be.
• What we do. Every report is read by a person. We are not going to print a turnaround time we have nothing behind — this is a small operation and a promise of hours would be a number, not a commitment — so what we will say is that reports are read in the order they arrive, except that anything putting somebody in danger goes to the front of it. We remove content that breaks these rules, and we suspend or permanently close the account behind it when that is warranted. For the worst of it — threats, sexual content involving a child, anything that puts somebody in danger — the account goes immediately and without warning, and we report it to the authorities where the law requires that.
• If you think we got it wrong, write to [email protected] from the address on the account and a person will read it.

The Service

Our Book Nook is provided as it is. We do our best to keep it running and to keep your writing safe, but we do not promise it will always be available or free of faults, and we are not responsible for what other members write — only for acting on it once we are told. Features may change. If we ever charge for something that is free today, we will say so before it happens.

To the extent the law allows, our liability for any claim connected to the app is limited to what you have paid us for it.

Ending It

You can delete your account at any time from Settings. That removes your captures, your recordings, your uploaded photos and your sign-in itself. Work the club made together — the books, the meetings, the volumes — remains for the other members with your name removed from it, and if you were the owner of a club, ownership passes to the longest-standing member left. A club with nobody left in it is deleted.

One thing stays behind: a reflection you handed to somebody. If it went out as a link anyone could open, the link closes and nobody can open it again — once you have gone there is nobody left who could close it later, so we close it for you. If you addressed it to one person by name, it stays with that person: a reflection addressed that way only ever opens for them, so leaving does not take it out of their hands. Stop sharing it before you delete your account if you would rather it closed too.

Either way, what you wrote inside it, and your name on its cover, we keep. A reflection and the letters written back about it are a record two people made, and only half of it is yours to erase.

We may close an account that breaks these rules, and we may stop offering the service. If we ever shut it down, we will give you notice and a way to take your writing with you.

Changes to These Terms

If these terms change in a way that matters, we will change the date at the top of this page and tell you in the app before the new version applies. Continuing to use Our Book Nook after that means you accept it.

Contact

Questions about these terms, or about something a member wrote, go to [email protected]. Questions about your data go to [email protected] or to the Privacy Policy. Anything else is on the Support page.