Terms of Use

1. Who we are and what this document is

1.1. books.dev is a web service for reading books in the language you are learning. It is owned and operated by NewGen Books LLC, a limited liability company formed in the State of Wyoming, United States, with its office at 30 N Gould St Ste N, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. In this document we call ourselves "we" or "the service", and we call you "you".

1.2. This document is the agreement between you and us: what you get, what you may and may not do, what it costs, what happens when something goes wrong.

1.3. Also part of the agreement: /privacy, /cookies, /refund, /dmca, /subprocessors, /ai, /accessibility and /credits.

1.4. What the service does today: reading in the browser, a dictionary card and an explanation of a tapped word in context, translation of a selected sentence, synthetic narration, reading progress, vocabulary cards with spaced repetition, exercises, public reader reviews, a personal shelf, and uploading your own books. The service is in beta: reading and saving words work now; paid plans are not on sale yet. We do not promise features not listed here.

1.5. One thing before the rest: when paid plans go on sale, we will run the service, but we will not be the shop. Stripe will sell you the subscription, as merchant of record — section 9 explains what that means.

2. Accepting these terms, your age, and where paid plans are sold

2.1. You accept this agreement when you register an account or start using the service. If you disagree with any part of it, do not use it.

2.2. Minimum age: 16 if you are in the European Economic Area, 13 everywhere else.

2.3. Age is self-declared. By registering an account or using the service you confirm you meet the minimum age above. We do not collect a date of birth and do not check documents — a deliberate choice in favour of collecting less about you.

2.4. If we learn that an account is used by someone below the minimum age, we block it and delete it with its data. Parents and guardians can write to privacy@books.dev.

2.5. Reading and the dictionary are free for everyone, wherever you are. Paid plans are not sold to people located in the Russian Federation or Belarus, or in any territory under comprehensive trade sanctions of the United States or the European Union, and prices are not shown in Russian or Belarusian roubles. On this basis we may refuse or cancel a payment. The restriction concerns payment only: the account and free reading stay available.

3. Your account

3.1. An email address is optional — the service supports anonymous accounts. Without one we cannot restore your access, tell you about changes to these terms, or reach you about a payment.

3.2. Anonymous (guest) accounts are not deleted automatically, however long they go unused. If you want a guest account deleted, write to support@books.dev.

3.3. An account is personal. Do not share access and do not create accounts for other people; you are responsible for what is done under yours. If you think your access has leaked, write to support@books.dev.

3.4. You can delete your account yourself with «Delete account» in your account settings. The account is hidden and sign-in to it is blocked at once. Its data — progress, vocabulary, reviews, uploaded books — is kept for up to 30 days and then deleted. Within those 30 days you can restore the account by writing to support@books.dev. The email address of a deleted account becomes free for a new account only after that final deletion. The /privacy has the detail.

3.5. To export your data, write to privacy@books.dev. We answer within 30 days.

4. The catalogue: what is in it and on what basis

4.1. The catalogue consists of public-domain works. Books still under copyright are not in it.

4.2. We take the files from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg, by hand.

4.3. The legal check before publication is strict and has two parts: the author of the original is assessed separately from the translator, under the rule "life plus seventy years". If the year of death of either is unknown, the book is unverified and is not published.

4.4. We strip the sources' own wrapping: the Project Gutenberg licence block and trademark, the Standard Ebooks colophon. The text of the work is not changed.

4.5. Dictionary data comes from open sources under CC BY-SA and CC BY licences — Wiktionary via kaikki, Open English WordNet and others. Sources and attribution are on /credits. On top of that data, dictionary entries, word explanations and sentence translations are generated by machine — by language models and a machine-translation service — and are not proofread by a human.

4.6. If you believe a book is in the catalogue by mistake and is still in copyright, write to copyright@books.dev (see section 12 and /dmca).

5. AI adaptations

5.1. AI notice. The adaptations of catalogue books by CEFR level are written by a language model from the original text: the model rewrites the full text at the chosen level. They are not proofread by a human — no editor and no proofreader reads that text before publication. The same notice appears at the end of each adapted book in the reader.

5.2. An adaptation is published as a separate edition with its level, not as a replacement for the original. The author of the original is credited as author of the original, not of this text. NewGen Books LLC is the publisher of the adaptation.

5.3. The original stays in the catalogue alongside every adaptation of it.

5.4. An honest warning about quality. An adaptation may distort meaning, oversimplify, lose detail and state facts the original does not. That is not a defect of one edition but a property of how the text is produced. Do not use adaptations where accuracy matters — quotation, study from a primary source, scholarly work, translation, textual analysis. Read the original for those.

5.5. We do not claim copyright in the machine-generated text itself. Where a human has edited an edition, that contribution may carry protection, but we do not assert this generally. What limits your use of the files is this agreement, section 7, not a copyright claim.

5.6. The /ai has the detail: where AI is used, which vendors receive which text, what the service does not do, and how to report a bad adaptation.

6. Uploading your own books

6.1. Uploading is available to registered accounts, signed in with Google or an email code; guest accounts cannot upload.

6.2. An uploaded book is visible only to the person who uploaded it. There is no shared catalogue of uploads, and we do not merge or deduplicate identical files from different people. Another person's file is never served to you, and yours is never served to anyone else.

6.3. When you upload, you tick a required attestation: you have a lawful copy of this book and are making a version for your own personal use. That is your statement, and you answer for it.

6.4. Do not upload books you have no right to, and do not use uploads to distribute anything. There is no technical way to pass a file to another person through the service.

6.5. Uploaded books are processed by the same external services as catalogue books, with no exception for private books. When you upload, the title, the author and the first few hundred characters of the text go to a language model that designs the cover. Words and passages of your text go to external providers when you use the dictionary, translation, word explanation or narration — language models, a machine-translation service and a speech-synthesis service. Some of these providers are free tiers or a decentralised network — Groq (free tier), DeepL API Free, GLM on GonkaRouter — whose terms may allow them to retain or use the text they receive. All providers are named on /subprocessors.

6.6. Books you uploaded stay available whatever plan you are on, including the free one. Once paid plans are on sale, paid features will work on them according to your current plan: if you move from a paid plan to the free one, the files stay and some capabilities are reduced.

7. What you may do with files from the service

7.1. You can download a built EPUB, both of your uploaded books and of catalogue editions, including AI adaptations. A fair-use limit applies: 30 files per day per account. It is there to stop bulk downloading of the catalogue, not to get in the way of reading.

7.2. Files obtained through the service are for your personal use. Do not post them publicly, put them on file-sharing sites or torrents, mail them out or sell them.

7.3. Here it is worth being honest. We cannot place a public-domain text under copyright — it is free, and you may take the same work from any other source and do what you like with it. The restriction in 7.2 is contractual: it concerns the files you obtained through our service, our build and typesetting and what comes with them. It applies to our AI adaptations on the same basis — this agreement, not a copyright claim.

7.4. Also not allowed: working around limits or paid access, harvesting the catalogue automatically, probing or overloading our infrastructure, sending bulk mail or malicious code, passing our material off as your own.

8. Reader reviews

8.1. Reviews are public. Apart from the text, other readers see the signature "Reader", the date, a note when the review is in another language, and how many readers found it helpful. They do not see your email address, avatar or anything else from your account; we know which account a review came from.

8.2. Write about the experience of reading. Do not post insults, harassment, spam, advertising, links and contact details, other people's personal data, or anything unlawful. We may reject or remove a review that breaks these rules; if you see one, tell us at support@books.dev.

8.3. By posting a review you give us a non-exclusive, free right to display it in the service. The rights in the text of your review stay yours.

9. Plans, payment and money

9.1. The service is in beta, and paid plans are not on sale yet: nothing is charged today. Reading, the dictionary and saving words are free for everyone. The rest of this section describes how paid plans will work once they are on sale.

9.2. Current plans, what each of them includes and their prices are on the pricing page at the time of purchase. Prices are set in US dollars; for convenience the pricing page may show them converted into some other currencies, but not into Russian or Belarusian roubles (see 2.5). The exact amount is shown at checkout before you pay; any conversion and exchange-rate margin at payment are Stripe's, not ours.

9.3. Billing periods. A month here means 30 days and a year means 365 days. These are not calendar periods: if you pay for a month on 31 January, the next charge falls 30 days later, not on 28 February.

Who sells you the subscription

9.4. There are two layers here, and both are worth stating precisely. The service relationship is with us: NewGen Books LLC provides the catalogue, the adaptations, the uploads and your account, and answers to you for them.

9.5. The purchase itself is concluded with Stripe. Sold through Link, LLC, a Stripe company, is the merchant of record for your subscription: we set the product and the price, Stripe sells it to you, takes the money and carries the tax. Purchases are marked "Sold through Link".

9.6. On your card or bank statement the charge appears as LINK.COM* followed by our descriptor. If a charge looks unfamiliar, that is what it is.

9.7. Checkout happens on Stripe's own page, on a Stripe domain. Your card details are entered there; they never reach books.dev and we never store them.

9.8. Sales tax, VAT and GST are Stripe's responsibility, not ours. Stripe calculates the tax that applies where you are, collects it at the moment of payment, and files and remits it in more than 80 countries.

9.9. Receipts, invoices, refund notifications and credit notes are sent to you directly by Stripe, from Link, with PDFs attached. Our own receipt settings do not affect them; that is where your accounting documents come from.

9.10. You can manage the subscription in two places: your account on books.dev, and link.com, where you can also see your order history, cancel or change the subscription, and update your payment method and billing address.

9.11. Link support handles payment- and subscription-level questions, and Stripe can act on its own. It may refund you without our approval — in particular if it asks us about your case and we do not answer within 48 hours, and in certain cases within 60 days of the transaction. Stripe also handles disputes and chargebacks: it decides whether to contest one and submits the evidence itself. None of this reduces your rights under 9.17.

9.12. Because Stripe is the merchant of record, its own terms and privacy notice govern the payment relationship, and Stripe is an independent controller of your payment data rather than a supplier acting on our instructions. The /privacy explains what follows, including that a deletion request you make to Stripe can cancel the subscription and remove payment records. Transactions are acquired by Stripe Payments Company or Stripe Technology Europe, Limited.

Cancelling, changing plan, failed payments and refunds

9.13. You can cancel at any time, in your account or at link.com. Access runs to the end of the period you have already paid for. Cancelling does not by itself refund the current period — the refund rule in 9.17 does that.

9.14. If a payment fails, we do not cut access off at once, and there is no separate grace period either: access runs to the end of the period you paid for. Update your payment method before then and nothing is interrupted.

9.15. A change of plan takes effect from the next billing period. The current period is not re-prorated either way: moving up charges no mid-period difference, moving down refunds none.

9.16. We may change prices and what each plan includes. We give 30 days' notice of any change that affects you, by email, if you gave us an address; if you disagree, cancel before it takes effect.

9.17. Refunds: 14 days from payment, no reason required, for readers in every country. The procedure, the timing and the grounds on which we can refuse are in the /refund.

10. Intellectual property

10.1. What belongs to us: the software, the design and the interface, the selection and arrangement of the catalogue as a compilation, our editorial material, our builds of the books, the dictionary and exercise data as compiled, and the brand and name books.dev.

10.2. Public-domain texts belong to nobody — not to us, and not to the sources we took them from. We do not claim copyright in the text of an AI adaptation either (see 5.5): we are its publisher, and what limits your use of the files is this agreement, not a claim of authorship.

10.3. Dictionary data belongs to its rights holders and is used under the open CC BY-SA and CC BY licences; attribution is on /credits. If you use that data further, comply with the relevant licence.

10.4. What is yours stays yours. We claim no rights in the books you upload or in your reviews. In an uploaded file we take only the rights needed to run the service for you: to store it and to process it for reading, narration, translation and explanations, for you alone.

10.5. The trademarks and logos of Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg and other third parties belong to them. We claim no partnership and no endorsement.

11. Suspension and termination

11.1. We may limit, suspend or end access to an account if you break this agreement — the age requirement, uploading books you have no rights to, distributing files from the service, working around limits, harming our infrastructure or other readers.

11.2. Three confirmed rights-holder claims against one account lead to that account being blocked.

11.3. Where a breach is unclear or fixable, we write first and give you time to fix it. We block immediately only in a clear and serious case.

11.4. Blocking an account for a breach does not cancel the 14-day refund right in 9.17. The only ground for refusing a refund is abuse of refunds themselves — re-registering for another refund. The detail is on /refund.

11.5. You can stop at any time, by cancelling the subscription or deleting your account (see 3.4).

11.6. We may shut down the service or discontinue parts of it. We give 60 days' notice of a shutdown or a material reduction in functionality, by email if you gave us an address, and we keep data export open for 90 days from that notice (see 3.5).

12. Copyright claims

12.1. If you are a rights holder and believe material in the service infringes your rights, write to copyright@books.dev; the full procedure is on /dmca.

12.2. We review a claim and, where it is well founded, take the material down expeditiously — in practice within 10 business days — logging the claims we receive and the decisions we take.

12.3. Counter-notification under §512(g) of the DMCA is available: if your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you can object. The safe harbour in §512(c) covers material readers upload; for our own catalogue and adaptations we are the publisher, not a host, and do not rely on it.

13. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

13.1. We build the service in good faith and want it to work. But we cannot guarantee that it will be available without interruption, free of errors, or suited to your particular purpose.

13.2. On the quality of texts in particular. AI adaptations are not proofread by a human and may contain errors (see 5.4). Sentence translations, word explanations and dictionary cards are generated automatically and can also be wrong; synthetic narration can mispronounce names and rare words; catalogue metadata from our sources can be inaccurate. Use all of it as a learning tool, not as a source of reliable facts, and tell us when you find an error.

13.3. We are not responsible for the availability or performance of the third-party services some features depend on: payments, model vendors, speech synthesis, hosting and storage. That limit is about how their services run. It does not remove our responsibility for your personal data, where we remain the controller and those vendors are sub-processors (/privacy, /subprocessors). Payment is the exception in 9.12.

13.4. Our total liability to you under this agreement is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, and in any case not less than USD 50. We do not compensate lost profit or indirect loss.

13.5. These limits apply as far as the law allows. They do not cover our own intent or gross negligence, or any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer in the EEA or the United Kingdom, your statutory rights remain intact — see section 15.

14. Changes to these terms

14.1. We may change this document: the service changes, the law changes, new features appear.

14.2. We give 30 days' notice of material changes, by email, if you gave us an address.

14.3. A change takes effect on the date stated. If you keep using the service after that date, you have accepted the new version; if you disagree, cancel or delete the account before then. Typos and clarifications that do not change the meaning we make without notice, but the date at the end is always updated.

15. Governing law and disputes

15.1. This agreement is governed by the law of the State of Wyoming, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.

15.2. Talk to us first: write to legal@books.dev describing the problem, and we will try to settle it without a court.

15.3. If that fails, disputes are heard by the courts of the State of Wyoming, USA, subject to 15.4.

15.4. Carve-out for consumers in the EEA and the United Kingdom. If you are a consumer resident in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you keep the mandatory rights given by the law of your own country, including the right to sue where you live and to rely on your own consumer-protection rules. Nothing here — not the choice of law, not the choice of court, not the limits on liability — takes those rights away or leaves you worse off than your own law guarantees.

15.5. Send formal legal notices to the address in 17.2.

16. General

16.1. If any clause turns out to be invalid, the rest stays in force, and the invalid clause is replaced by the closest permissible rule with the same purpose. If we do not exercise a right straight away, that is not a waiver of it.

16.2. We may transfer our rights and obligations in a reorganisation or a sale of the business. Your rights are not made worse by it, and we will tell you in advance. You may not transfer yours.

16.3. This document is written in English and the English version governs; translations are for convenience. Where a mandatory consumer-protection rule in your country requires that a term be given to you in your own language, the version in that language prevails for that rule.

16.4. This document, together with the documents listed in 1.3, is the entire agreement between you and us about the service.

17. Contacts

17.1. Legal questions and notices — legal@books.dev. Personal data, export and deletion — privacy@books.dev. Rights-holder claims — copyright@books.dev. Security reports — security@books.dev. Support and everything else — support@books.dev.

17.2. Postal address for legal notices — NewGen Books LLC, 30 N Gould St Ste N, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA.

17.3. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, write to privacy@books.dev on any matter concerning your personal data. Your right to complain to the supervisory authority of your own country is described in the /privacy.

Effective 17 October 2026