Terms of service

What Abridgedly is

A map of books on neighbours' shelves, plus the messages and requests that let you arrange to swap, borrow, buy or rent one. Using the site or the app means you accept these terms. If you do not, don't use it.

Your account

• You need to be 13 or older. We do not knowingly keep accounts for children under 13.
• One person per account, and the account is yours to look after. What happens under your sign-in is treated as you, so tell us at [email protected] if you think someone else is in it.
• You can delete your account yourself, from settings, at any time. What that erases and what deliberately survives is spelled out in the privacy policy.

What you post

Your shelves, photos, notes, reviews, messages and profile stay yours. You keep owning them; you give us permission to store and display them where you chose to publish them, so the map, your profile and your shelves can work. That permission ends when you delete the content or the account, except for the copies that survive for the reason the privacy policy names (a message in someone else's thread, a rating on someone else's average).

Only post what you have the right to post. Book covers and descriptions come from catalogues and belong to whoever made them; a photo you take of your own shelf is yours.

Conduct

Don't do these, on any surface here:

• Harass, threaten, or abuse another member, or send them what they asked you to stop sending.
• Post anything unlawful, hateful, sexually explicit, or aimed at a child.
• List something you don't have, don't own, or can't legally hand over.
• Spam, advertise something that isn't a book on your shelf, or scrape the site.
• Impersonate someone, or publish anybody's address or contact details, including your own neighbours'.
• Break or probe the service: automated abuse, rate-limit evasion, or reaching for accounts and data that aren't yours.

A member's profile, a conversation or a single message in it, a club or a comment in one, and a photo or comment on a little library can all be reported, from the thing itself. Reports come to us, and we read the conversation a report is about in order to deal with it. If something else here is wrong and has no report button, write to us.

Exchanges between neighbours

We take no fee and no cut. When you swap, lend, sell or rent a book, the arrangement is between the two of you: we don't handle the money, hold the book, verify anyone's identity, or guarantee that either of you turns up. That also means we can't refund you, and a dispute over a book is yours to settle with the person you met.

Meeting a stranger is your call to make: pick a public spot, and tell someone where you're going. A handover spot is stored at a coarse area rather than a point, which is a privacy measure, not a safety guarantee. If a member makes you uneasy, block them and report them.

The one paid thing

Listing, browsing, borrowing and lending are free. Two ceilings sit on the free tier: 100 books listed for sale or rent, counting the ones already sold, and 100 shelf photos scanned in 30 days. Past either, carrying on needs Abridgedly Plus, $10.00/month. It is the only thing that lifts a limit.

Payments run through Stripe, which handles the card; we never see it. You can cancel at any time from your billing settings, and you keep what you already have on the free tier when the plan ends. If we change the price, we will tell you before the new one applies to you.

There is one other subscription, and it is the opposite of a tier: you can chip in monthly as a supporter. It buys you nothing. Every free thing stays free, every limit stays where it is, and you can stop it the same way.

Moderation, and closing an account

We can hide a book, a shelf, a message, a photo, a comment or a club from public view when it breaks these rules, and we can disable an account, which signs it out everywhere and takes its content off every public surface. We do that for conduct, not for taste: a shelf we find dull stays up.

Something of yours that we hide is marked as hidden on your own screens rather than silently gone, and you can write to us about it. The exception is a photo or comment you left on a little library: those have no page of yours to carry the marker, so ask us if one disappears. You can close your own account at any time, and we can stop offering the service, in which case we will give what notice we can. Nothing here traps you: your books were always yours.

Where we stand if it goes wrong

Abridgedly is provided as it is. We work to keep it up and accurate, but we don't promise it will be available without interruption, that a listing is truthful, that book data from the catalogues is right, or that a person you meet is who they say they are.

So far as the law where you live allows: we are not liable for what members do to each other, for a book that never arrived or arrived damaged, or for indirect losses. Where we are liable anyway, our liability is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the problem, which for most people is nothing. Some places don't allow those limits, and in those places you keep the rights they give you.

Changes, and getting in touch

If we change these terms in a way that matters, we will say so on What's new and move the date at the top; carrying on using Abridgedly after that means the new terms apply. Anything you want to raise, including a report or a complaint about a decision we made: [email protected].