Terms of Service

BeBook (www.be-book.org) is a community project run from the United Kingdom by its individual operator ("we", "us"). It is not a registered company, and we make no claim to a company number or registered office. Contact: Contact the webmaster.

You must be at least 16 years old and confirm this when you register. You provide accurate registration details, keep your credentials secure and are responsible for activity on your account. One person, one account.

You are a consumer using a free service. Nothing here removes your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. Books are exchanged directly between members: BeBook is not the seller, and consumer sale rights apply between you and the other member only where that member is acting as a trader.

You confirm you own or lawfully possess the books you scan, and that your photos do not infringe anyone's rights. You grant us a non-exclusive licence to process your photos and the extracted text in order to recognise the book, enrich the shared catalogue and display your listing. Edition-level catalogue facts (title, author, ISBN, publisher) become part of the shared BeBook catalogue.

Making a copy available publishes it to other signed-in members with its condition, BeBook credits value and coarse area. Exchanges are agreed directly between members. BeBook credits are an in-app unit of account for balancing exchanges: they have no monetary value, cannot be redeemed for cash and are not a payment instrument or stored-value product.

You are responsible for describing condition honestly, for meeting safely, and for what you hand over. We are not a party to exchanges between members.

Balance bonuses are added to a balance, never multiplied with it. Each meeting point a member looks after adds a bonus equal to that member's bonus-free balance on the day the mandate starts, and exactly that amount is taken back when the mandate ends, is transferred or the point closes. From the 42 credits given on joining: 42 + 42 for the data-consent bonus = 84, + 42 for a first meeting point = 126, + 42 for a second one = 168. A meeting-point bonus is never kept after the mandate, and it is granted again whenever a new mandate starts. While a member looks after at least one point, the library and marketplace limits are lifted; once the last mandate ends, the ordinary limits of 20 books and 10 active listings apply again immediately. No book or listing is ever deleted or switched off for that reason, but no new book can be added and no further listing activated while the member is above those limits.

• No illegal, counterfeit, stolen or hate-promoting material.
• No harassment, spam or solicitation in chat.
• No scraping, automated bulk access or attempts to bypass access controls.
• No deliberately false metadata, fake listings or manipulation of BeBook credits values.

We may remove content, restrict features or suspend accounts that break these rules.

Our handling of personal data is described in the Privacy Policy. BeBook may use account-linked or pseudonymous activity in a proportionate, data-minimised and access-limited way to operate, secure, measure, improve and develop BeBook itself. This internal use is separate from the optional “Commercial data use outside BeBook” consent. That consent is off by default and is never required to use BeBook. Activating it includes a minimum active period of 30 calendar days, after which it continues until you switch it off; the exact date is shown in your account. Each activation may credit a one-shot balance-match bonus equal to your balance excluding every other bonus at that moment; that amount is not recalculated afterwards, switching the consent off removes exactly that bonus, and a later activation credits a freshly calculated bonus. Private contact details, an exact postal address and private message contents are not included in commercial use. No solely automated decision with legal or similarly significant effect is made under this consent.

The service is provided as-is and may change, be interrupted or be discontinued. We may update these terms; material changes will be announced in the app before taking effect.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, nor for the conduct, condition of goods, or agreements of other members. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law.

You can delete your account permanently at any time from Settings → Account details; what is erased, what is anonymised and what is retained is described in the Privacy Policy. Deletion is refused only while you have an exchange in progress or a book lent out, so the other member is not left stranded.

We may suspend an account for serious or repeated breaches of these terms, or where content is illegal or harmful. A suspended account cannot sign in; its data is untouched and it can be reactivated. We may permanently remove an account for serious abuse.

BeBook includes member-to-member messaging. We keep an illegal-content risk assessment and a children's access assessment under the Online Safety Act 2023, act on reports, and remove content or accounts where required. Report concerns to Contact the webmaster.

These terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction — without prejudice to the mandatory consumer protections of the country where you live.

Automated safety checks run on new and edited messages in private conversations, on book discussions and on public reviews. They look only for abuse, threats, exposure of personal details, scams and spam. Content that clearly threatens someone is refused; anything else is delivered normally and may be flagged for limited human review by the webmaster.

If your message is refused, you can ask a human to look at it. Repeated confirmed violations may lead to the usual account measures, decided by a person and never by the automatic check alone.

Star ratings, written reviews and book discussion messages belong to the book, not to a copy or a listing, so they survive when a copy is given away, sold or removed. If you delete your account, these public literary contributions are kept but irreversibly detached from you: your identifier and profile link are removed, any contact details are stripped, and the contribution is shown as written by a former BeBook member. Private conversations, personal notes and private data are deleted as described above and are never published.

To prevent and resolve disputes, BeBook may ask you for a phone number, or suspend listing, exchange, message and library actions until a postal verification is completed, or suspend those actions for 30 days. You can always sign in, read the notice with its exact dates, complete the verification requested and reach Settings and the legal pages. A successful postal verification lifts the operational block but the case stays under administrative review until the operator decides. No account is deleted automatically at the end of a suspension. Questions and appeals: use the protected webmaster contact on this page.