Terms of Service

01Acceptance of these terms

By creating an account, contributing a record, rating a book, or otherwise using Novella — the website and services operated by [COMPANY] (company number [COMPANY NUMBER]), registered in England and Wales at [REGISTERED OFFICE] (collectively, the Service) — you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service (the Terms). If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

These Terms incorporate our Privacy Policy by reference. Where that document and these Terms conflict on a specific point, these Terms control.

Nothing in these Terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

02Who can use Novella

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under 18, you may use Novella only with the involvement of a parent or legal guardian who agrees to these Terms on your behalf.

You may not use the Service if you are barred from doing so under any law that applies to you, or if we have previously terminated your account for a breach of these Terms.

03Your account

When you create an account you agree to give accurate information and keep it current. You are responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your credentials confidential.

• Choose a password unique to Novella and do not share it.
• Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed without your permission.
• You may download a copy of your data at any time from Settings, and you may close your account at any time from Settings. Section 14 explains what happens to your data when you do.

04Community records

Novella’s catalogue is built and maintained by its readers. A Community Record is a book, edition, series, or author entry that any member may create or edit.

Because Community Records are contributed by members, they may contain errors. When you add or edit a record, you agree to:

• describe the work truthfully and to the best of your knowledge;
• not impersonate an author, publisher, or rights-holder;
• not use records to advertise, spam, or manipulate discovery.

We may edit, merge, verify, or remove any record to keep the catalogue accurate. Contributing a record does not give you ownership of the underlying bibliographic facts, which are not ours or yours to own.

05Ratings and reviews

Ratings and reviews only work if they are honest. You agree that every rating and review you post reflects your genuine, first-hand opinion of a work you have actually read or engaged with.

The following are prohibited and may lead to removal of your contributions or your account:

• posting ratings or reviews in exchange for payment, goods, or services;
• coordinating with others to inflate or suppress a work’s rating;
• operating more than one account to rate the same work.

06Our commitments to you

These are obligations we take on, not marketing.

We do not sell placement. No rating can be purchased, and no amount of money moves a book up a shelf.

• We will not sell your personal information.
• We will not accept payment to place a book, author, or list into a recommendation surface.
• We will not rank what you see by engagement.

If we ever intend to depart from a commitment in this section, we will change these Terms first and tell you before the change takes effect, as described in section 15.

07Content you contribute

Anything you post to Novella is yours, and you keep ownership of it. What you grant us differs depending on what you are contributing, because the catalogue has to outlive any one contributor while your own writing should not.

Catalogue contributions

Catalogue contributions are the shared, factual layer of Novella: records you create or edit, merges, links between works and editions, genre and tag assignments, and the structure of public lists.

You grant [COMPANY] a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence, with the right to sub-licence, to host, store, reproduce, adapt, publish, distribute, and otherwise use your catalogue contributions for any purpose, including commercially — including making them available through a paid or licensed interface (an API), and on surfaces that carry affiliate or other commercial links.

This licence survives the deletion of your content and the closing of your account. It has to: the catalogue is a shared work, other members build on your edits, and a record that vanished when its author left would take everyone else’s work with it. When you close your account these contributions remain in the catalogue, disassociated from your name (see section 14).

Expressive content

Expressive content is your own writing and personal expression: reviews, list descriptions, profile text, and similar material.

You grant [COMPANY] a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence, with the right to sub-licence, to host, store, reproduce, adapt, publish, distribute, and otherwise use your expressive content for any purpose, including commercially, for as long as you choose to keep it on Novella.

This licence ends when you delete that content or close your account, except that we may keep copies as our Privacy Policy describes or as the law requires, and except that we cannot recall copies already distributed to a sub-licensee before deletion. On deletion, we will stop displaying and stop redistributing it.

Your promises about content

You confirm that you have the rights necessary to post your content and that it does not infringe anyone else’s rights or break any law. You are solely responsible for your content and the consequences of posting it.

To the extent permitted by law, you waive any moral rights you have in the content you post, so that we can display, excerpt, and format it as the Service requires.

08Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• harass, threaten, or abuse other members;
• post unlawful, hateful, or deliberately misleading material;
• scrape, crawl, or harvest data except as our published interfaces allow;
• interfere with the Service’s security, or attempt to access accounts that are not yours;
• use the Service to distribute malware or unsolicited commercial messages.

If you see content that breaks these rules, you can report it using the flag control on any review, list, or record. We review reports and may remove content, or suspend or restrict the accounts responsible.

09Intellectual property

The Novella name, wordmark, interface, and software are owned by [COMPANY] and protected by intellectual-property law. These Terms grant you no right to use our branding without our written permission.

Book covers, titles, and descriptions remain the property of their respective rights-holders. If you believe material on Novella infringes your copyright, contact us using the details in section 18 and tell us what the material is, where it appears, why you believe it infringes, and how to reach you. We will remove or disable material that we determine to be infringing.

10Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have. By using the Service you also agree to that policy. In short: your reading data is yours, private shelves stay private, and we do not sell your personal information.

11Third-party links

The Service may link to booksellers, libraries, or other third-party sites. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content or practices. Following a link is at your own discretion, and the third party’s own terms and privacy policy will apply.

12Disclaimers

The Service is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. To the fullest extent permitted by law, and without affecting your statutory rights as a consumer, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and the accuracy of Community Records. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

13Limitation of liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for: death or personal injury caused by our negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

Subject to that, and to the fullest extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any loss that was not reasonably foreseeable, nor for any loss of data, goodwill, or profits arising from your use of the Service.

If you are a consumer, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these Terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss or damage that is not foreseeable.

14Termination

You may close your account at any time from Settings.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you break these Terms, if the law requires it, or if we discontinue the Service.

When your account is closed:

• your reviews, ratings, and other expressive content are removed from public view, and the licence in section 07 ends;
• your catalogue contributions remain in the catalogue as community property, disassociated from your name, under the perpetual licence in section 07;
• we retain limited data only as our Privacy Policy describes.

15Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms. When we make a material change we will update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, notify you in the app or by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change means you accept the revised Terms.

If you do not accept a change, you may close your account before it takes effect. Section 14 explains what happens to your contributions.

16Governing law

These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales.

If you are a consumer, you may bring proceedings in the courts of the part of the United Kingdom in which you live, and you benefit from any mandatory protections of the law of the country where you are resident. If you are a business, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

17General

These Terms, together with the documents they incorporate, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service, and they replace any earlier understanding.

• If a court finds part of these Terms unenforceable, the rest continues in full force.
• If we do not enforce a right under these Terms straight away, we have not given it up — we may still enforce it later.
• You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these Terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours to a successor that takes on the Service, provided your rights are not reduced by the transfer.
• These Terms do not give any rights to anyone who is not a party to them, and no third party may enforce them under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

18Contact us

Questions about these Terms are welcome. Write to us at legal@readnovella.com, or to [COMPANY], [REGISTERED OFFICE].