1. About these terms
1.1 These terms of sale (the “Terms”) apply to every order you place for books through the Bookish Badger website (the “Site”). Please read them before you order. You can print or save them with the button at the top of this page.
1.2 Bookish Badger is a trading name. In this document “we”, “us” and “our” mean the person or business named as the seller in the Business details of our Terms of sale, Returns, Privacy notice and Contact us pages, trading as Bookish Badger. Those pages give the seller’s name, geographic address and, where they apply, company and VAT details. Every page gives our email addresses.
1.3 When you place an order you accept these Terms. The description, price and delivery information shown on the Site for each item when you order also form part of our contract with you. The version of these Terms that applies to your order is the one published on the Site when you placed it; we keep a record of it and will send you a copy on request.
1.4 These Terms are for consumers, meaning individuals buying wholly or mainly for purposes outside their trade, business, craft or profession. If you buy as a business, clause 16 applies.
1.5 Nothing in these Terms affects your legal rights as a consumer. Where these Terms describe those rights they summarise them; the law itself always prevails. Free, independent advice is available from Citizens Advice (England and Wales), Advice Direct Scotland and Consumerline (Northern Ireland). If you live outside the United Kingdom, you keep whatever rights the consumer law of the country where you live gives you, and nothing in these Terms takes them away. Where these Terms give you more than that law requires, you keep what these Terms give you.
1.6 The Delivery information and Returns, refunds and cancellation pages give practical detail that is consistent with these Terms. The Privacy notice explains how we use personal data, and the Website terms of use apply to using the Site generally. If another document conflicts with these Terms on anything about your order, these Terms prevail.
2. Words with special meanings
2.1 “Book” means any title we sell, in any format. “Print Book” means a paperback or hardback copy. “Signed Copy” means a Print Book signed by its author and sold as a separate option. “EPUB” means a Book supplied as a digital file in EPUB format.
2.2 “Order” means your request to buy one or more Books. “Order Confirmation” means the email in which we confirm that we have accepted your Order. “Order Page” means the private page, reached through the secure link in your Order emails, where you can follow your Order and use your EPUBs.
2.3 “Working day” means Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays in England. “Writing” and “written” include email.
3. Age and content
3.1 Our catalogue is adult horror. Many Books contain graphic violence, gore, sexual content, abuse or other material that some readers will find disturbing. Each Book has a content notice on its page. Please read it, and the description, before you buy. The themes or content of a Book are not a fault where they are accurately described.
3.2 You must be 18 or over to place an Order, and by placing an Order you confirm that you are. If you buy a Book as a gift, you are responsible for making sure it is suitable for the person who receives it.
4. The Books
4.1 We describe each Book, including its format, size, features and content notice, as accurately as we can. Cover images are illustrations. Print Books are printed to order, and small differences in colour, trim and finish between copies are normal in print-on-demand production. They are not a fault provided the copy is of satisfactory quality and matches its description.
4.2 EPUBs are standard EPUB files. The Book page tells you what you need to read them. Most phones, tablets, computers and e-readers can open EPUB files, sometimes with a free app; please check your device before you buy. You can also read EPUBs in our online reader in a web browser, or send them to a Kindle (see clause 8).
4.3 Unless the Book page says otherwise, a Signed Copy carries the author’s signature only and not a personal dedication.
5. Ordering and when the contract is made
5.1 To order, add Books to your basket, choose any signed-copy option, tick the confirmations we ask for and select Checkout. You then go to our payment provider, Stripe, to enter your delivery address and payment details and review your Order. You can correct mistakes in your basket before checkout, and on the payment page before you confirm payment. Contracts are concluded in English only.
5.2 When you confirm payment you are offering to buy the Books in your Order on these Terms. We show you a confirmation page and then email you our Order Confirmation. The contract between you and us is made when we send the Order Confirmation.
5.3 We may decline an Order before we send the Order Confirmation, for example because a Book is no longer available, the payment is not authorised, the delivery address is outside the areas we deliver to, there was an obvious error in a price or description (clause 6.4), or we reasonably suspect fraud. If we decline an Order after taking payment, we tell you and refund you in full without undue delay and in any event within 14 days.
5.4 We keep a record of each Order and of the Terms that applied to it. Your Order Confirmation and Order Page give you the main details of your Order.
6. Prices and payment
6.1 Prices are in pounds sterling (GBP). The price of each Book and the delivery charge are shown on the Site and in your basket before you pay. The total shown before you confirm payment is the total you pay us, including delivery and any other compulsory charge we make. If the payment page offers to show or charge the total in your own currency, Stripe converts it at its own exchange rate, which may include a conversion fee; you can choose to pay in GBP instead. Your card issuer may charge its own fees for a payment in a foreign currency.
6.2 If the Business details show that we are registered for VAT, our prices include VAT at the applicable rate. If they show that we are not registered for VAT, no VAT is charged. If the rate of VAT changes between your Order and delivery, we will not charge you more than the price you agreed. Our prices do not include import VAT, customs duties or other charges that another country may collect on delivery (clause 7.7).
6.3 Signed Copies cost more than unsigned copies of the same Book. The additional amount is shown on the Book page and in your basket.
6.4 We check prices carefully, but errors can happen. If the correct price of a Book on the date of your Order is lower than the price shown, we charge the lower price. If the correct price is higher, we contact you before accepting your Order so that you can decide whether to buy at the correct price. If we have already accepted an Order containing an obvious pricing error that you could reasonably have recognised as a mistake, we may end the contract, tell you and refund you in full.
6.5 We take payment through Stripe when you confirm your Order. Stripe processes your card or other payment details; we never see or store your full card details. You can use the payment methods shown on the Stripe payment page.
6.6 The delivery charge is the carrier’s postage plus our print partner’s handling fee for your Order, and any destination tax that our print partner adds, passed on to you at cost. We add no mark-up. The delivery charge for your Order is shown in your basket and on the payment page before you pay.
7. Delivery of Print Books
7.1 We deliver Print Books wherever our print partner can deliver, currently about 177 countries. We do not deliver to Russia, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba or any other place we cannot deliver to. The countries you can select in your basket and at checkout are the ones we deliver to, and the basket shows whether we deliver to you. The list can change as our print partner’s delivery network changes. EPUBs are different (clause 8.6). Our Delivery information page explains delivery in more detail.
7.2 Print Books are printed to order and posted by our print partner, possibly from a country other than the one you live in, and sent to you by a delivery service. Signed Copies are posted by the author, or printed and sent to the author to sign and post, so they take longer, and may not be available for every destination: the basket tells you if one cannot be delivered to you. The estimated delivery time is shown before you pay or in your Order Confirmation. Estimates are not guaranteed dates unless we specifically agree a date with you. Customs checks can add time.
7.3 Unless we agree a different time with you, we will deliver your Print Books without undue delay and in any event within 30 days after the day the contract is made. If we do not, you may treat the contract as at an end where the law allows, for example where delivery within that time was essential or where we fail to deliver within a further reasonable period that you set. We will then refund the price of the undelivered Books and the delivery charge for them.
7.4 An Order may arrive in more than one parcel. Delivery of a parcel is complete when it is delivered to the address you gave us.
7.5 The Books are our responsibility until they are delivered to you or to someone you have named to receive them. Ownership of the Books passes to you on delivery, provided we have received payment in full.
7.6 If a parcel is returned to us because the address you gave was incomplete or incorrect, or because it was not collected, we will contact you to arrange redelivery and may ask you to pay the reasonable cost of sending it again. If we cannot reach you within 14 days, or you do not want redelivery, we may end the contract and refund the price of the Books and the standard delivery charge.
7.7 A parcel that is delivered to an address in a different country from the one it is posted from is an import into the country it is delivered to. Its customs authority or the carrier may charge import VAT, customs duties or a handling fee before delivering it. These charges are not included in our prices or delivery charges, we do not collect them, and you, as the recipient, are responsible for them. Our print partner may post from another country, so we tell you in your basket, on the payment page and in your Order Confirmation whenever the delivery address is outside the United Kingdom. If they are not paid and the parcel comes back to us, clause 7.6 applies.
7.8 We hold each Order for up to about 24 hours after you place it, before our print partner starts printing, so that it can still be stopped if something is wrong. Until printing starts, you can ask us to cancel the Order and we will cancel it and refund you in full, including the delivery charge. If you ask us to correct a mistake in the Order, such as the delivery address, we will do so where we are able to. Once printing has started the Order cannot be stopped, and clauses 9 and 11 apply. The hold is included in the estimated delivery time.
8. EPUBs and digital content
8.1 When your payment is confirmed, each EPUB in your Order is made available on your Order Page. From there you can download it, read it in our online reader, or ask us to email it to your Kindle.
8.2 To protect authors’ work, each EPUB can be downloaded or sent to a Kindle a limited number of times within a limited period. Both limits are shown on your Order Page and are normally 10 downloads within 365 days of payment. Reading in our online reader does not count towards the download limit and is available for the same period. Please keep a copy of each file you download; once downloaded it is yours to keep and read for as long as you like. If the private link to your Order Page has expired, contact us and we will send you a new one.
8.3 Sending to a Kindle uses Amazon’s Send to Kindle service. You may need to add our sending address to the approved list in your Amazon account. Amazon decides whether a file is accepted and how it is converted and displayed. We are not responsible for Amazon’s service, but this does not affect your rights if the EPUB itself is faulty.
8.4 Each EPUB is licensed to you, not sold. We grant you, on behalf of the author and any other rights holders, a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to download, store and read the EPUB on devices you own or control, for your own private and non-commercial use. You must not copy an EPUB beyond what that use needs; share, sell, lend, rent, upload, publish or otherwise make an EPUB or any part of it available to anyone else; remove or alter any copyright notice or identifying information; or use any Book or part of it to train, fine-tune or test an artificial-intelligence or machine-learning system or for text and data mining, except where the law expressly permits it despite this clause.
8.5 If you break clause 8.4 we may suspend your access to further downloads and to the online reader for the EPUB concerned. This does not affect any refund or other remedy you are entitled to by law.
8.6 EPUBs are available only to buyers in the countries we offer them to at checkout, which do not include member states of the European Union. We check the country of your billing address and, for an Order that also contains Print Books, the delivery country. If an Order containing an EPUB is paid from a country where we do not supply EPUBs, we cancel the Order and refund you in full.
9. Your right to cancel if you change your mind
9.1 Print Books, including Signed Copies. You may cancel your contract for Print Books for any reason, without giving a reason, at any time from placing your Order until the end of 14 days after the day on which you, or someone you name, receive the Books. If your Order arrives in separate parcels, the 14 days run from the day you receive the last one.
9.2 EPUBs. The cancellation period for an EPUB ends 14 days after the contract is made. At checkout, however, we ask you to agree that we may make the EPUB available to you immediately, and to acknowledge that you will lose your right to cancel once we do. We make an EPUB available only if you have given that agreement and acknowledgement, and we confirm them in your Order Confirmation. Once the EPUB has been made available on your Order Page, you can no longer cancel the contract for that EPUB because you have changed your mind. You keep all your rights if the EPUB is faulty (clause 11).
9.3 To cancel, you must tell us clearly before the cancellation period ends, by email to our support address or by post to our address (both in the Business details). You may use the model cancellation form on our Returns, refunds and cancellation page, but you do not have to. Your cancellation is in time if you send it before the period ends.
9.4 If you cancel after Print Books have been delivered, you must send them back to the returns address given on our Returns page and in your order confirmation email, not to the printer, without undue delay and in any event within 14 days after the day you tell us you are cancelling. You pay the cost of returning Books you have cancelled because you changed your mind, including from outside the United Kingdom. We recommend a tracked postal service, and that you keep proof of postage.
9.5 We refund the price you paid for the cancelled Books, including any signed-copy amount. If you cancel the whole Order, we also refund the standard delivery charge. If you cancel only some of the Books in an Order, we refund the delivery charge only to the extent that it would not have been payable for the Books you keep.
9.6 If you cancel before we have sent the Books, we refund you within 14 days after the day you tell us. Otherwise we refund you within 14 days after the day we receive the Books back or, if earlier, the day you give us evidence that you have sent them. We refund you using the payment method you used, and we do not charge a fee for the refund. If you cancel while the Order is still on hold (clause 7.8), the Books have not been printed, there is nothing to send back, and we refund you in full, including the delivery charge.
9.7 You may examine a Book as you would in a shop. We may reduce your refund to reflect any loss in value caused by handling it more than was necessary to establish its nature, characteristics and condition, for example if it has been read through, written in or damaged. We never make this deduction where we failed to give you the information about your right to cancel that the law requires.
10. Signed Copies
10.1 When you choose a Signed Copy, we give your name and delivery address to the author so they can sign and post the copy on our behalf. You confirm this at checkout. The author may use your details only to send your copy; they stop seeing them, and the details are removed from the author’s task, once the copy is marked as sent or the Order is refunded. The Privacy notice explains this further.
10.2 Signed Copies depend on the author’s availability. If the author cannot provide your Signed Copy within the estimated time, we will contact you and you may choose to wait, to receive an unsigned copy with a refund of the signed-copy amount, or to cancel that Book for a full refund.
10.3 We remain responsible to you under these Terms for the delivery and condition of a Signed Copy, even though the author posts it.
11. Faulty, damaged or incorrect items
11.1 We are under a legal duty to supply Books that conform with this contract. This is a summary of your key legal rights; they are subject to certain exceptions.
11.2 Print Books. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, goods must be as described, fit for purpose and of satisfactory quality. During the expected life of your product your legal rights entitle you to the following. Up to 30 days: if your goods are faulty, you can get an immediate refund. Up to six months: if your goods cannot be repaired or replaced, you are entitled to a full refund, in most cases. Up to six years: if your goods do not last a reasonable length of time you may be entitled to some money back.
11.3 EPUBs. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, digital content must be as described, fit for purpose and of satisfactory quality. If your digital content is faulty, you are entitled to a repair or a replacement. If the fault cannot be fixed, or if it has not been fixed within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience, you can get some or all of your money back. If you can show that the fault has damaged your device and we have not used reasonable care and skill, you may be entitled to a repair or compensation.
11.4 To use these rights, email us with your Order reference, the Book, and a description of the problem. For a damaged, misprinted or defective Print Book, please send photos of the book and its packaging. We may ask you to return a faulty Print Book; if so, we pay the reasonable cost of returning it. If you live outside the United Kingdom, we will normally replace or refund a faulty or damaged Print Book on the basis of photos, without asking you to send it back, where that is practical. Where you are entitled to a refund for a fault, we pay it without undue delay and within 14 days of agreeing that you are entitled to it, using the payment method you used and without any fee.
11.5 Our promise for Print Books, in addition to your legal rights. If a Print Book arrives damaged, defective or misprinted, and you tell us, with photos, within 30 days after delivery, we will send you a replacement or, if you prefer or a replacement is not possible, refund the price of the Book and its delivery charge. We do not normally ask you to send the Book back. If a parcel has not arrived and you tell us within 30 days after the end of the estimated delivery time, we will look into it with the carrier and then send you a replacement or refund you. Where the law gives you a longer time or a better remedy, you keep it: if you live in the United Kingdom or the European Union, the time limits in the law apply to your legal rights, and the 30 days apply only to this promise. This promise does not cover damage that you cause, or content that was accurately described (clause 3.1).
12. If we cannot supply a Book
12.1 We may end the contract for a Book if, after we accept your Order, it becomes unavailable because the author has withdrawn it or our printer cannot produce it, or because of an event outside our control (clause 14). We will tell you promptly and refund you in full for that Book, including the delivery charge for anything we do not deliver.
13. Our responsibility for loss or damage
13.1 If we fail to comply with these Terms, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking this contract or our failing to use reasonable care and skill. Loss or damage is foreseeable if it is obvious that it will happen, or if, at the time the contract was made, both we and you knew it might happen.
13.2 We do not exclude or limit in any way our liability to you where it would be unlawful to do so. This includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence or that of our employees, agents or subcontractors; for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; for breach of your legal rights in relation to the Books, including the rights summarised in clause 11; and for damage to your device or digital content caused by digital content we supplied where we failed to use reasonable care and skill.
13.3 We supply Books for domestic and private use only. We are not liable to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption or loss of business opportunity.
13.4 Subject to clause 13.2, our total liability to you for any other loss or damage arising out of or in connection with an Order is limited to the total price you paid for that Order.
14. Events outside our control
14.1 We are not responsible for a delay or failure to perform caused by an event outside our reasonable control, such as severe weather, fire, flood, strikes or failures in postal or carrier networks, a failure of our printer or of payment or hosting providers that we could not reasonably have prevented, epidemic, war, terrorism, civil unrest or a cyber attack.
14.2 If such an event affects your Order, we will contact you as soon as possible and take reasonable steps to limit the delay. If the delay is likely to be substantial, you may contact us to end the contract and receive a refund for any Books you have paid for but not received. This clause does not affect your right to cancel under clause 9 or your rights for faulty items under clause 11.
15. Complaints, disputes and the law
15.1 If you have a problem, contact us first. Our Complaints policy explains how we handle complaints and how quickly.
15.2 If we cannot resolve your complaint, we will give you our final response in writing, together with the name and website of a certified alternative dispute resolution (ADR) provider that could consider it, and we will tell you whether we agree to use that provider. You do not have to use ADR, and using it does not stop you going to court. If you live outside the United Kingdom, a consumer advice body in your country may also be able to help.
15.3 These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. You can bring legal proceedings about your Order in the courts of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland, you can also bring proceedings in Scotland; if you live in Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in Northern Ireland. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you also keep the protection of any mandatory consumer law of the part of the United Kingdom where you live. If you live outside the United Kingdom, this choice of law does not take away the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country where you live, and you may also be able to bring proceedings in the courts of that country.
16. Business customers
16.1 If you buy as a business: clause 9 and the statements of consumer rights in these Terms do not apply to you; our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with an Order is limited to the price paid for that Order; we are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business or goodwill; and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. Nothing in this clause limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
17. Other important terms
17.1 We may transfer our rights and obligations under a contract with you to another person or organisation, for example if our business is sold or becomes a company. We will tell you if this happens, and if you are unhappy with the transfer you may cancel any Order that has not yet been delivered and receive a refund. You may transfer your rights under these Terms only with our written agreement, although you may of course give a Book as a gift.
17.2 The contract is between you and us. No other person has any right to enforce any of its terms.
17.3 Each clause of these Terms operates separately. If a court or other authority decides that any of them is unlawful, the rest remain in full force.
17.4 If we do not insist straight away that you do something you are required to do under these Terms, or we delay taking steps against you, that does not mean you do not have to do it and does not stop us taking steps later.
17.5 We may update these Terms from time to time. Changes do not affect Orders placed before the change. The version and the date it took effect are shown at the top of this page.
17.6 These Terms and the information about your Order described in clause 1.3 are the whole agreement between you and us about your Order. This does not limit our liability for any misrepresentation, or any information that the law treats as part of the contract.