Terms of Service

01 What BookFold is

BookFold is a web app that turns a document you already have — a PDF, Word file, EPUB, RTF, HTML, Markdown or plain text file — into a clean, e-reader-style reading experience, with optional read-aloud. It runs in your browser. It can be installed as an app and used offline.

The conversion itself happens inside your browser, on your own device. Your files are not uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload them to: BookFold has no file server and no document storage. The libraries that do the work are served from the same site as the app and run locally. The Privacy Policy covers this in detail.

BookFold is made and run by one person. In these terms, “we” and “us” mean that operator; “you” means the person using the app.

02 Agreeing to these terms

By using BookFold you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the app — and if you have already paid, ask for a refund under the Refund Policy.

You need to be old enough to enter into a contract where you live, and if you are buying Pro on behalf of an employer, you need to be authorised to do so.

03 There is no account

BookFold has no sign-up, no login and no password. You do not create an account and we do not create one for you. That has two consequences worth stating plainly:

• Your books, reading positions, bookmarks and settings live in the browser you used, not in an account in the cloud. They do not follow you to another browser or another device.
• If you clear your browser’s site data, use private browsing, or a browser evicts stored data to reclaim space, that content is gone and we cannot restore it — we never had a copy.

Pro itself is recoverable: see section 4.

04 Free, Pro, and the licence you get

The reader and read-aloud are free and unlimited. The free version adds a small “Made with BookFold” watermark to the reading view.

BookFold Pro is a one-time payment of US$39. It is not a subscription. There is nothing to cancel and nothing that renews. Pro unlocks:

• Removal of the “Made with BookFold” watermark.
• Downloading a standalone offline reader file for a book — a single file you keep, which opens and reads itself without BookFold, without an internet connection and without us.
• Exporting your highlights.

What the licence allows

When you buy Pro we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, perpetual licence to use the Pro features of BookFold. Perpetual means we will not switch off a licence you have paid for, and it does not expire on a date. It is personal: it is for you and the devices you use, not for redistribution, resale, or unlocking Pro for other people.

How Pro travels between your browsers

Pro is stored in the browser where you bought it. To turn it on somewhere else — a phone, a second laptop, a browser whose data you cleared — use the restore option and enter the email address you paid with. We check that address against the payment record held by Stripe and re-issue your licence. There is no fixed device limit, but this is a personal licence: it is for your own use, not for sharing an email address around.

What the licence does not allow

• Reselling, sublicensing, renting or bundling BookFold or a Pro licence.
• Sharing, publishing or trading a licence token so that other people can unlock Pro.
• Modifying or working around the licence check to obtain Pro features without paying. BookFold’s licence check runs in your browser, so it is not technically hard to defeat. We would rather say so honestly than pretend otherwise — but doing it is a breach of these terms, and there is a fully functional free version for people who do not want to pay.

Files you produce with BookFold from your own documents are yours. We claim no rights over them, and the downloaded standalone reader is yours to keep, back up and read on any device.

05 Your documents are your responsibility

This is the most important thing in these terms, so it gets its own section.

You are responsible for having the right to use any document you convert. BookFold is a tool that reformats a file you already have on your device. It is not a library, a bookstore, or a source of content. Converting a book does not give you any rights in that book that you did not already have.

By using BookFold you confirm that, for each document you convert, you either own it, have a licence to it, have permission from the rights holder, or the document is out of copyright or otherwise free to use in the way you are using it. Making a personal-use format shift of a book you own is treated differently in different countries; converting and then distributing a copyrighted work almost never is. That judgement is yours to make.

You must not use BookFold to strip or work around technical protection measures (DRM) on a file, where doing so is unlawful where you are.

Because conversion happens entirely on your device, we do not see, scan, review or moderate what you convert — we cannot. That is a deliberate privacy decision, and the flip side of it is that responsibility for the content sits with you, not with us.

06 Acceptable use

Please do not:

• Use BookFold to infringe anyone’s copyright or other rights (see section 5).
• Attack, overload, probe or disrupt the site or the payment endpoints, or attempt to gain access to systems or data that are not yours.
• Automate the purchase-restore lookup to test email addresses, or otherwise use it for anything other than restoring your own purchase.
• Re-host BookFold as your own product, or remove the attribution from the free version without buying Pro.
• Use BookFold in a way that is unlawful where you are, or that would put us in breach of the law.

If someone abuses the hosted service, we may block access to it. That does not take away a downloaded reader you already have, and it does not extinguish a refund you would otherwise be entitled to.

07 What the conversion can and cannot do

Document conversion is best-effort. We work hard on it, but we do not guarantee that any document converts perfectly, or at all.

• PDF. A PDF describes where marks sit on a page, not what the reading order is. Extracting a clean flow of text from that is inference. Columns, tables, footnotes, headers, ligatures, hyphenation and unusual fonts can all come out imperfectly.
• Legacy .doc files. The old binary Word format is handled with a best-effort text extractor. Expect plainer results than with .docx; some files will not extract usefully at all.
• OCR of scanned PDFs. When a PDF has no text layer, BookFold can read the page images with an on-device OCR engine. OCR is a statistical guess at what the pixels say. It misreads characters, especially on low-resolution scans, handwriting, unusual typefaces and non-English text. It is a convenience, not a transcription service.
• Layout. BookFold deliberately reflows a document into a reading experience. It is not a page-faithful viewer, and it is not the right tool where exact layout matters.

Always keep your original file. Do not rely on a BookFold conversion where accuracy has real consequences — legal, medical, financial, safety-critical or academic-citation contexts among them. Check anything important against the original.

08 Read-aloud depends on your device

BookFold does not make voices. Read-aloud uses your browser’s built-in speech feature and the voices already installed on your device by your operating system or browser. That means:

• Which voices you get, how natural they sound, which languages are available, and how well pauses and pronunciation work are determined by your device — not by us.
• Quality varies enormously between an old Android phone, a current iPhone, Windows and macOS, and between browsers on the same machine.
• Some devices offer higher-quality “online” or network voices. Those are processed by the operating system or browser vendor, not by BookFold. See the Privacy Policy for what that means.
• Some browsers limit how long speech can run, or stop it when a tab is in the background.

We cannot promise a particular voice, a particular quality, or that read-aloud works on your specific device. If read-aloud matters to you, try it in the free version before buying Pro — read-aloud is free, and Pro does not change it.

09 Your library lives in your browser

Converted books are saved in your browser’s own storage on your device (“My Library”). We have no copy, no backup and no way to recover them. Browsers can and do delete stored site data — when you clear history or site data, in private browsing, when storage runs low, and on some browsers after a period of not visiting a site.

Treat My Library as a convenience, not as a backup. Keep your original documents. If a book matters to you, Pro’s downloaded standalone reader is a real file on your disk that no browser will quietly evict.

10 Price, payment and tax

Pro costs US$39, once. Payment is taken by Stripe through a Stripe-hosted payment page. Stripe collects and processes your card details and your email address; we never see or store your card number. Your payment is also governed by Stripe’s own terms and privacy policy.

Prices are in US dollars. If your card is in another currency, your bank sets the exchange rate and may add its own fee — that is between you and your bank. Where sales tax or VAT applies, it is handled at checkout and shown before you pay.

After a successful payment you are returned to BookFold and Pro is unlocked in that browser. If something goes wrong on the way back — you closed the tab, the network dropped — use the restore option with the email you paid with, and nothing is lost.

Refunds are covered by the Refund Policy: 30 days, no questions asked.

11 Availability — and what happens if BookFold goes away

BookFold is a small, independent product run by one person on hosted infrastructure. We do not guarantee that the site will be available, uninterrupted, or error-free, and we do not offer an uptime commitment. We may change, suspend or discontinue features, and we may stop hosting the site altogether.

Because that is a real risk when you have paid for something, the product is built so that it does not depend on us continuing to exist:

• BookFold is an installable, offline-capable app. Once loaded, it keeps working without a network connection.
• Pro lets you download a standalone reader file for each book. It is a self-contained file on your own disk. It does not call home, it does not check a licence, and it will keep opening long after any given website has gone.

If we ever wind the hosted service down, we will aim to give reasonable notice on the site so people can download the readers they want to keep. If you are relying on Pro, download the readers for the books that matter to you rather than assuming the site will be there next year.

12 Open-source components

BookFold uses well-known open-source libraries to read your files — among them pdf.js, mammoth, JSZip, marked and Tesseract for OCR. They are bundled with the app and served from the same site, so using BookFold makes no requests to anyone else. Those components remain under their own licences, which are included with the files we serve. Nothing in these terms limits your rights under those licences.

13 The service is provided as it is

BookFold is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied — including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the app will meet your requirements, that conversions will be accurate or complete, that read-aloud will work on your device, or that defects will be corrected.

Some countries do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, and some give consumers rights that cannot be excluded by contract. Nothing here removes those rights. If you are a consumer, you keep every statutory right you have where you live, and the paragraph above applies only as far as the law allows.

14 Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim connected with BookFold — whatever the legal basis — is limited to the amount you actually paid us in the twelve months before the claim. For a Pro buyer that is US$39. For a free user that is nothing, and the honest answer is that a free tool provided at no cost carries no financial exposure for us.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses: lost profits, lost data, lost time, lost books, business interruption, or the cost of substitute services. In particular, and given how the product works, we are not liable for documents or libraries lost when browser storage is cleared or evicted, or for decisions taken on the basis of an inaccurate conversion or OCR result.

Nothing in this section limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law where you live. Consumer protection laws in your country may give you rights that override these limits; where they do, they win.

15 Changes to these terms

We may update these terms — to describe a new feature, to fix something unclear, or because the law changed. The current version always lives at this address, with the date it was last updated at the top. For a material change we will make it visible in the app rather than quietly editing the page.

Continuing to use BookFold after a change means you accept the updated terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the app; if the change is material and you bought Pro within the last 30 days, the Refund Policy applies as usual.

A change to these terms cannot retroactively take away a Pro licence you have already paid for. Whatever we change here, the licence you bought stays bought.

16 Ending this agreement

You can stop at any time: close the tab, uninstall the app, and clear BookFold’s site data to remove your library and licence from that browser. There is no account to delete and no subscription to cancel.

We may suspend or block access to the hosted service if it is being used to attack the site, to break the law, or in serious breach of section 6. If we do that, any refund you are entitled to under the Refund Policy still stands, and any standalone readers you have downloaded keep working — they do not check with us.

Sections that are meant to survive the end of this agreement — your responsibility for the documents you converted, the disclaimers, the liability limits and the governing law — survive it.

17 Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of [JURISDICTION — TO BE COMPLETED: country/state whose law applies], and the courts of [VENUE — TO BE COMPLETED: courts that will hear disputes] will have jurisdiction over any dispute.

If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live, and you may be able to bring proceedings there.

Before anything formal, please just email us. Almost everything that reaches a dispute over a US$39 product is a misunderstanding, and the refund policy is deliberately generous so that nobody has to argue.

If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest still applies. Our not enforcing something straight away does not mean we have given it up.

18 Contact

Questions about these terms, or about anything else:

support@bookfold.app

We are one person, so please allow a couple of business days for a reply.