Terms of use

MyBookCat is a catalogue for real bookshelves — at home, in a madrasa, a masjid, a school or a community library. These are the terms you agree to by using it. They are meant to be read once and understood, so they are short and they say what actually happens.

Your account

You need an account, and you should be 13 or older to hold one. Keep your sign-in to yourself, because anything done through your account is treated as done by you. Give a real email address. It is how you get back in, and how we reach you about the service.

One person, one account. If several people work on a catalogue, invite them into it rather than sharing a login. That is what the roles are for, and it is the only way the record of who added what means anything.

Your catalogue is yours

The books, notes, ratings, photographs and structure you put into MyBookCat belong to you. We do not claim ownership of them and we do not sell them. We store and process them to run the service for you, and nothing else.

You can take the whole catalogue out at any time, on any plan, from Settings, as Excel or CSV. That is deliberate: a catalogue you cannot leave with is not really yours.

You are responsible for what you put in — that you may lawfully store it, and that photographing a cover or an inside page is something you are entitled to do with the book in front of you.

Libraries with more than one person in them

A library has an owner and can have members with different roles. The owner decides who is in it and what they may do, and can remove anyone.

The important consequence: a library belongs to the person who created it, not to everyone in it. If the owner deletes their account, the library goes, and everyone in it loses access. The app says so before it accepts that. If a library matters to a group, decide deliberately whose account holds it, and keep an export.

Lending, borrowers and reminders

You can record a loan and MyBookCat will email the borrower about it: when they take the book, before it falls due, on the day, and if it runs late. You get a summary of what is outstanding.

When you enter somebody's email address you are asking us to write to a person who has no account here and no relationship with us. That is your call to make and your responsibility: only enter an address where it is reasonable to write about the book, and take the loan off when it should stop. You can turn reminders off for a whole library in Settings. We will honour a direct request from a borrower to stop emailing them.

Publishing a library

You can publish a read-only page for a library and choose what it shows. While it is on, anyone with the link can see the fields you ticked, which is what publishing means. Turning it off cuts access immediately.

Think before ticking “where a book sits” on a page you send beyond people you know. It describes the inside of a building.

Scanning with AI, and what it can get wrong

Photograph a cover and the app reads it, including in scripts you could not type. It is good and it is not perfect. It can misread a title, an edition or a volume number, particularly on a worn or ornate cover, and it marks a book for review when it is unsure.

Check what it writes down. A catalogue is a record you will rely on later, and a wrong title is worse than a missing one, because you will not know to doubt it.

Photographed scans have a monthly allowance on paid plans, and can be topped up with scan packs. Barcode scanning, typing a book in, and adding one from a link are unlimited on every plan, including the free one.

Paying

Basic is free and stays free. Pro and Library Pro are subscriptions, monthly or yearly. Scan packs are bought once, added to whatever plan you are on, and do not expire.

Polar is the merchant of record. They sell the plan, take the card, handle the tax and run any trial, and their terms cover the transaction itself. Cancel from the billing portal in Settings at any time. The plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for and then stops. We do not keep your card details, because we never receive them.

If something goes wrong with a payment, such as being charged twice, or charged after cancelling, or paying for a plan that never arrived, tell us. We will sort it out with Polar rather than send you away.

Prices can change. An existing subscription keeps its price until the change is announced to you and a renewal follows it.

Fair use

Don't:

• store anything unlawful, or photographs of things you have no right to photograph
• use another person's email address to send them something they would not want
• script, scrape or hammer the service, or work around the scan allowance rather than buying scans
• try to reach another person's library, or test whether you can — ask us instead and we will answer honestly

We can suspend or close an account that does these things. Where it is not obviously deliberate we will ask first.

What we promise, and what we don't

We work to keep the service up and your catalogue safe, and we take backups. We cannot promise it will never be down, never lose anything, or never get a book's details wrong. The service is provided as it is.

This is why the export exists and why we point at it twice. If your catalogue represents months of work, keep a copy of your own. That is true of every service, and it is truer of a small one.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and our liability is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before the problem. Nothing here limits anything that cannot lawfully be limited, including your consumer rights.

Ending it

Delete your account from Settings whenever you like. It deletes rather than deactivates, and what goes with it is set out in Privacy. Export first if you want to keep the catalogue.

We may close an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, or stop offering the service. If we stop offering it, we will give notice and time to export, and refund the unused part of a subscription.

Changes

When these terms change the date at the top changes with them. A change that materially affects you will be told to you in the app, not slipped in here. Carrying on using MyBookCat after that is how you accept it; if you would rather not, export and delete.

Getting in touch

Support reaches a person. There is no queue, because it is a small service.