Terms

Where Books Go follows books through Little Free Libraries, used bookshops, thrift stores and the other places books change hands. Using the app means agreeing to what is on this page. If you don’t, the app isn’t for you, and you can erase your account at any time without asking anyone.

The privacy policy is the other half of this and says what is collected, what is shown publicly, and how to remove yourself.

You need to be 13 or older. The app isn’t intended for children, and accounts aren’t knowingly created for them.

One account is one person. Keep your password to yourself. Anything logged from your account is treated as yours.

Your username is public. So pick one you don’t mind strangers seeing on a book’s journey. You can change it, though not more than once a month, and you can log anonymously instead — per stop, or permanently.

Stops, places, notes and photos are the shared record this app exists to build, and almost all of it is public by design. What you write stays yours; by adding it you give Where Books Go permission to show it in the app as part of that record.

Your stops outlive your account, deliberately. A stop is the middle of somebody else’s book’s history. Erasing your account takes your name off your stops and deletes what you wrote, and leaves the stops where they are — removing them would not leave a gap, it would close one up and invent a leg the book never travelled.

Things not to do, which are the whole of the rulebook:

Don’t pin somewhere that isn’t really there. A wrong pin sends a real person to a real wrong street. Put the pin where the books are, give the place a name somebody else would recognise, and use “this isn’t here any more’” when a box goes.

Don’t map somewhere people can’t go. Book boxes often stand in front gardens, and that is fine — being visible from the pavement is the test. Anywhere somebody would have to trespass to reach isn’t a place for the map.

Don’t log what didn’t happen. Invented stops are the one thing that makes the whole record worth less than nothing.

Don’t be abusive, and don’t photograph people who didn’t ask. Notes and photos attached to a stop are part of somebody else’s book’s page. Harassment, slurs, other people’s private information and anything illegal will have the account behind them closed.

Leaving a book somewhere is giving it away. That is what the app is for. Once you set a book loose, it belongs to whoever picks it up, and neither they nor Where Books Go owe you its return. Don’t set loose a book you would be sorry to lose.

A code identifies a copy; it doesn’t own one. The eight characters written in a book let its journey be followed. They give nobody — not you, not us — any claim over the physical book, which belongs to whoever is holding it.

What’s written in a book stays legible to whoever finds it. Codes are shown to the reader who tagged a copy and to anyone who has proved they held it by typing the code in. That is a privacy measure, not a lock: a book in your hands always tells you its own code.

Logging books, adding places and following a book’s journey are free and are staying free. A membership is $4/month and adds things around the edges of that — the nearby-drops digest, following places, what’s on a shelf right now, themes, the journal, your year in books.

Billing. Monthly in advance, through Stripe, who handle the card details — we never see them. It renews until you stop it.

Cancelling. Whenever you like, from your profile, with no conversation to sit through. You keep the membership until the end of the month you’ve paid for, and then the app becomes the free one again. Nothing you logged is affected either way.

Refunds. Part-months aren’t refunded as a rule, but if something went wrong — charged twice, charged after cancelling, a feature that didn’t work — write to admin@wherebooksgo.com and it will be put right.

If the price changes. You’ll be told before it applies to you, and you can cancel rather than accept it.

If you run a bookshop, thrift store or cafe on the map, you can claim its listing and manage it. Claiming is free and always will be: a claim is verified by phone call, an email on the business’s own domain, or a photograph of the storefront.

Bookshop Pro. $12/month, with a 7-day trial, and it adds more photographs and a notice at the top of your listing. It buys presentation and nothing else: a paid listing is never ranked above an unpaid one on the map, and no amount of money makes a shop more findable here than the shop next door.

A claim can be undone. If a claim turns out to be somebody who doesn’t run the place, it is removed. Disputes go to admin@wherebooksgo.com.

The store sells a stamp and printed sticker sheets for marking books, and it lets you reserve codes to print at home for nothing. A reservation is not a purchase and ships nothing.

Codes are reserved to you. A code printed on a sticker is yours and is never issued to anybody else, which is why orders can’t be undone once the codes are drawn.

If an order goes wrong. Doesn’t arrive, arrives damaged, arrives wrong — write to admin@wherebooksgo.com and it will be replaced or refunded. There is a person at that address, not a form.

A pin is a claim, not a guarantee. Every place on this map was added by somebody like you, and boxes are taken down, moved and emptied all the time. The app can tell you what was logged; it cannot tell you what is standing there now. Use your own judgement about where you go and when — especially after dark, and especially somewhere you don’t know.

The same goes for what is written here by other readers: notes, photographs and place descriptions are theirs, not ours, and aren’t checked before they appear.

The app is provided as it is. It may be down, it may lose a connection, and features may change. Nothing here is a professional service and nobody is liable for what happens on a walk to a book box.

You can erase your account yourself, at any time, from your profile. It is immediate and there is no undo.

An account can be closed from this end for the things in the rulebook above — junk pins, invented stops, harassment. That is a last resort and not a silent one: you’ll be told why.

Where Books Go is run from Connecticut, in the United States, and this agreement is governed by Connecticut law. If something ever had to be settled by a court, it would be a state or federal court there.

That doesn’t take away protections your own country gives you. Plenty of places say consumer rights can’t be signed away in a document like this one, and where that’s the law, it wins over the paragraph above.

If these terms change in a way that affects what you may do or what you are paying for, the date at the top changes and the change is described rather than quietly folded in.

Write to admin@wherebooksgo.com. Privacy questions have their own address, on the privacy page.