1. The agreement
These terms and conditions ("terms") are a binding agreement between you and the operator of Book Publishing Tools Online ("we", "us", "the service"), covering the website epubcreator.online and every tool, page, download, and form on it. By visiting the site, creating an account, or using any tool you accept these terms and the privacy policy, which forms part of them. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
If you use the service for an organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind it, and "you" includes the organisation.
2. Who may use the service
You must be at least 16 years old and legally able to enter into a contract. You may not use the service if we have previously suspended or closed an account of yours for breaking these terms.
3. The service and the beta
The service provides browser-based tools for preparing and promoting books: manuscript conversion to EPUB and PDF, cover and business-card design, hosted one-page book websites, image and video creation, and a library of licensed stock media.
The service is in an open beta. During the beta every tool is free, no payment is taken, and no card is requested. Features, limits, and designs may change, be added, or be withdrawn while we learn from real use, and things may occasionally break. Keep your own copies of your manuscript and of every file you export; the tools are built so that you always can. We will tell account holders by email before any charge is introduced.
4. Your account
- Every tool requires an account. Give a working email address and keep it current; it is how we reach you about your account and about changes to these terms.
- One person per account, and one account per person unless we agree otherwise. Do not share your password or let anyone else use your account.
- You are responsible for everything done through your account. Tell us at once through the feedback form if you believe someone else has access to it.
- Cloud save slots are limited per plan and, once claimed, are permanent within your account. The book title on a slot is locked when it is claimed, as the app warns before you claim it; you can replace a slot's content at any time.
5. Your content
"Your content" means everything you import, type, upload, save, export, or publish through the service: manuscripts, covers, images, videos, pages, and the details on them.
It stays yours. You keep every right in your content. We claim no ownership of it and no share of any income from it. Exported files are yours to use however you wish, with no attribution to us and no fee.
The permission we need. So that the service can function, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, process, convert, display, and transmit your content, solely to operate, secure, and improve the service and to do what you ask of it. For a book page you publish, that includes showing the page at its public address, listing it in the Library, and letting search engines index it. The licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in routine backups for a limited time and for copies that third parties such as search engines already hold.
What we will not do with it. We do not read your content except to resolve a problem you report, to investigate a report of abuse, or when the law requires it. We do not use your content to train artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models, and we do not license it to anyone else.
Your responsibilities. You confirm that you own your content or hold the rights needed to use it as you do, that it does not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark, privacy, or other rights, that it is not unlawful, and that it contains no malicious code. You alone are responsible for your content and for how you use the files you export, including checking that a book meets the requirements of any store, printer, or distributor you send it to.
6. Published book pages and the Library
A book page is public from the moment you publish it: anyone can view it, it is listed in the public Library, and search engines can index it. It must be about a book and must not be used as a general web page for anything else. You can unpublish or delete a page at any time.
We may unpublish or remove a page, and may decline to list a page in the Library, if we reasonably believe it breaks these terms or the law, harms other people, or damages the reputation or operation of the service. We will tell you when we do unless the law prevents it. We may link to published pages from the site and from our own social-media accounts as examples of what the service makes; unpublishing a page ends that.
7. Stock media licence
Photos and video clips in the stock library ("stock media") are licensed to you, not sold, on the following terms, which apply to every item you download.
What you may do. Use stock media in your own book-related work: book covers, book pages and websites, business cards, social-media images and videos, advertising and other promotion for your books, and similar promotional material, in any medium, worldwide, without expiry, for any number of your books. You may crop, edit, animate, and combine stock media with your own material. Media downloaded during the beta remains licensed on these terms after the beta ends, and the licence for media you have already downloaded survives the closure of your account.
What you may not do. Resell, redistribute, share, or sub-license stock media on its own or as part of a collection; offer it as stock, a template, or a design asset; use it as the main value of a product (for example prints, posters, merchandise, or wallpapers where the image is the product); use it in a way that is unlawful, defamatory, or pornographic, or that presents an identifiable person, place, or brand in a false, offensive, or endorsing way; register it, or anything substantially derived from it, as a trademark or design; claim it as your own photography or footage; use it to train or improve a machine-learning model; or download it by automated means or beyond the daily limits shown in the app.
No release, no warranty. Stock media is provided as is. It may include people, property, or brands that are recognisable; no model, property, or trademark release accompanies it. You are responsible for judging whether a particular use needs such a release or other permission and for obtaining it. We may add items to the library or remove them at any time; removal does not affect media you have already downloaded.
Limits. Downloads are metered per account per day. The current limit is shown in the app and may change with notice.
8. Acceptable use
You agree not to do any of the following, and not to help anyone else to:
- use the service for anything unlawful, or to create, store, publish, or distribute content that is illegal, infringing, defamatory, harassing, hateful, sexually exploitative, or that incites violence;
- upload or publish anything you do not have the right to, including other people's books, images, or personal information;
- impersonate a person or organisation, or misrepresent who wrote a book;
- probe, scan, overload, or interfere with the service or its security, sign-in, rate limits, or export and download limits, or gain access to anyone else's account or content;
- scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the stock library, the Library of book pages, or any other part of the service, or use automated tools to create accounts or claim slots;
- copy, modify, reverse-engineer, resell, or offer the service or any part of it as your own product, or remove notices from it;
- use the service to send spam or to distribute malware; or
- use published pages for anything other than a book, including link farming, phishing, or search-engine manipulation.
We may investigate suspected breaches and may remove content, limit features, or suspend or close an account to deal with them.
9. Copyright complaints
We respect the rights of authors and other creators and expect the same of everyone who uses the service. If you believe a published page or other content on the service infringes your copyright, send a notice through the feedback form with "copyright" in the message, including: a description of the work you own and where it can be seen; the address of the content you say infringes it; your contact details; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised; a statement that the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for the owner; and your name as signature. We remove or disable content that we find infringing, forward notices to the account holder, who may respond, and close the accounts of repeat infringers.
10. Our intellectual property
The service itself, including its software, design, text, guides, templates, name, and logo, belongs to us or to our licensors and is protected by copyright and other laws. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the service as these terms allow. Nothing in these terms gives you any other right in the service. Files you export are yours (section 5); the tools that made them are not.
If you send us suggestions or feedback, we may use them without any obligation to you.
11. Plans, prices, and payment
Nothing is charged during the beta. When paid plans begin:
- A plan is a licence for one year from the date of purchase, paid in advance in US dollars through Stripe. It does not renew automatically; you choose whether to buy another year. Buying while a licence is active adds a year to it.
- The prices and what each plan includes are those shown on the price list at the time you buy. We may change prices; a change applies only to purchases made after it. Taxes are added at checkout where they apply.
- There are no royalties, no per-book fees, and no revenue share, ever.
- Usage limits (such as monthly export credits and daily stock downloads) are part of each plan and are shown in the app. Test exports are watermarked. We may adjust limits on reasonable notice.
- Refunds and cancellation. You may cancel a purchase within 14 days for a full refund by asking through the feedback form; the refund removes the licence year it paid for. After 14 days, fees are non-refundable unless the law of your country gives you a right to a refund, which these terms do not take away. If a full refund is issued for any reason, the corresponding licence ends.
- Stripe's own terms apply to the payment itself. We never see or store card numbers.
12. Suspension and ending the agreement
By you. You can stop using the service at any time. To delete your account and everything saved with it, ask through the feedback form from the email address on the account; we confirm when it is done. Export anything you want to keep first, because deletion is permanent.
By us. We may suspend or close your account, remove content, or restrict features if you break these terms, if we must for legal or security reasons, or if we discontinue the service. Where reasonable we will warn you first and give you a chance to export your work. If we close a paid account for a reason other than your breach, we refund the unused part of the licence year.
Afterwards. Section 5 (as to backups and third-party copies), section 7 (for stock media you have already downloaded), and sections 13 to 18 continue to apply after the agreement ends.
13. Disclaimers
The service is provided "as is" and "as available", and during the beta it is still being tested. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties or conditions of any kind, express or implied, including of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement, and we do not promise that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or free of data loss. Exported files are generated from your content and settings; you are responsible for checking them, and we do not guarantee that any store, printer, or distributor will accept them. The guides are general information about self-publishing, not legal, tax, or professional advice; the stores' own rules change and prevail.
14. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows: (a) we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost sales, lost data, lost goodwill, or the cost of substitute services, however caused and under any theory of liability, even if we were told they were possible; and (b) our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the service or these terms is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose and fifty US dollars.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for gross negligence or wilful misconduct, or for anything else that cannot be excluded or limited by law, and nothing in them reduces the rights you have as a consumer under the law of the country where you live.
15. Your responsibility to us
To the extent the law allows, you will compensate us for losses, costs, and reasonable legal fees arising from a third party's claim caused by your content, by your use of the service in breach of these terms, or by your breach of anyone else's rights. This does not apply to the extent a claim results from our own fault.
16. Governing law and disputes
These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Nova Scotia and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If a problem arises, contact us first; most issues can be settled by talking. Any dispute that cannot be settled that way will be brought in the courts of Nova Scotia, and you and we submit to their jurisdiction. If you are a consumer in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or another place whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings in the courts of your own country and the protection of its mandatory consumer laws, nothing in this section removes those rights. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.
17. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. When we do, the effective date at the top changes. For a material change, we email account holders at least 14 days before it takes effect and, where practical, show a notice in the app; a change required by law or needed to address a security or abuse problem may take effect sooner. If you do not accept a change, stop using the service and ask us to delete your account before it takes effect. Using the service after the effective date means you accept the new terms.
18. General
- These terms, the privacy policy, and the limits and prices shown in the app and on the price list are the entire agreement between you and us about the service, and replace any earlier terms.
- If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply, and the unenforceable part is replaced with the closest enforceable term.
- If we do not enforce a term on one occasion, we may still enforce it later.
- You may not transfer your account or these terms to anyone else. We may transfer this agreement to a successor that takes over the service, and will tell you if we do.
- We are not responsible for delay or failure caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including outages at the providers the service depends on.
- Notices to you are sent to the email address on your account or shown in the app; notices to us go through the feedback form. You agree to receive notices and other communications about the service electronically.
- These terms are written in English; any translation is for convenience only, and the English text prevails.
- Nothing in these terms creates a partnership, employment, or agency relationship, and no one other than you and us has rights under them.
19. Contact
Questions about these terms go through the feedback form or the routes on the contact page.