1. About these terms
1.1 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.
1.2 These terms of use (the “Website Terms”) apply to everyone who visits or uses the Bookish Badger website and its services (the “Site”). By using the Site you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the Site.
1.3 Other terms also apply: our Community guidelines when you post or interact with other members (they form part of these Website Terms); our Terms of sale when you buy; and our Author publishing terms (available to authors) if you publish with us. Our Privacy notice and Cookies and analytics notice explain how we use personal data. If those documents conflict with these Website Terms on their subject, they prevail.
2. Who can use the Site
2.1 The Site sells and discusses adult horror. Book pages carry content notices; please read them. You must be 18 or over to create an account, buy, review, post, comment or take part in any community feature.
2.2 The Site is directed at people in the United Kingdom. If you use it from elsewhere, you are responsible for complying with local laws.
3. Your account
3.1 You may create one account. The information you give us must be accurate and kept up to date, and your account is for you alone.
3.2 You are responsible for keeping your password, passkeys, emailed sign-in codes and access to your email account secure, and for activity on your account. Tell us straight away if you think someone else has used it. If you sign in with Google or Discord, their terms also apply to that sign-in.
3.3 Display names and handles must not be misleading, offensive or impersonate anyone, and must follow our Community guidelines. We may change or remove one that does not.
4. Using the Site properly
4.1 You must not use the Site: in any way that breaks the law or our Community guidelines; to send unsolicited advertising or spam; to harass, threaten or harm anyone; or to impersonate anyone.
4.2 You must not: try to gain unauthorised access to the Site, other accounts, our systems or data; probe, scan or test the Site’s security; get around access controls, download limits, rate limits or bot checks; introduce viruses or other harmful code; interfere with or overload the Site; or reverse engineer any part of it except where the law allows.
4.3 You must not use robots, scrapers or other automated means to access, copy or collect content or data from the Site, other than standard search-engine indexing that follows our robots.txt file. You must not use bots, scripts or AI tools to post, comment, review, react, follow, report or send messages on the Site (see clause 5.5 of our Community guidelines).
4.4 Private links to orders and support conversations are for you alone. Do not share them or post them anywhere. We may cancel a link and issue a new one if we think it has been shared.
5. Intellectual property
5.1 The Site and its content, including its design, text, graphics, software and the selection and arrangement of its content, belong to us or to our licensors. The Books, their covers and extracts belong to their authors and other rights holders. All rights are reserved.
5.2 You may view the Site for your own personal, non-commercial use, and print or save our policies and your own order records. Any other use needs our written permission, or, for a Book, the rights holder’s.
5.3 We and the authors expressly reserve all rights to use the Site’s content, including the Books, for text and data mining and for training, fine-tuning or testing artificial-intelligence or machine-learning systems. You must not use the content for those purposes except where the law expressly permits it despite this reservation.
5.4 “Bookish Badger” and our logo are our trade marks. You must not use them without our written permission, except to refer to us accurately.
6. Content posted by members
6.1 Reviews, comments, author updates, reader profiles and other material posted by members are governed by our Community guidelines, which include the licence you give us to display what you post. Material posted by members expresses their own views, not ours.
6.2 If you send us ideas or suggestions about the Site, we may use them without any obligation to you.
6.3 You keep ownership of the content you post or submit to the Site. You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, transferable and sublicensable licence to host, store, copy, reproduce, adapt, modify, format, translate, display, distribute and otherwise use that content on and in connection with the Site and our services. This includes using it to enhance and improve the experience, for example through formatting, moderation, search and new features. We may store it for as long as we need to. Section 7 of our Community guidelines gives more detail and applies alongside this clause.
6.4 We are not obliged to display, keep or publish any content. This licence does not affect your rights over your personal data, which our Privacy notice explains, or any moral rights you have, to the extent the law does not allow them to be waived.
7. Links and other services
7.1 The Site links to services run by others, including Stripe for payment, Amazon for Send to Kindle, Google and Discord for sign-in, Cloudflare for bot checks, carriers for tracking, and websites that authors list on their pages. Those services have their own terms and privacy notices. We do not control them, and a link is not an endorsement.
8. Information and availability
8.1 The content of the Site is provided for general information. We work to keep it accurate and up to date, but we may correct or change it at any time. Information about a Book you order forms part of your contract under our Terms of sale.
8.2 The Site is provided free of charge. We do not guarantee that it, or any feature, will always be available or uninterrupted. We may suspend, withdraw or change any part of it, for example for maintenance or security. We will try to give reasonable notice of changes that significantly affect account holders.
9. Suspending or closing accounts
9.1 We may remove any content, and restrict features, suspend or close any account, or remove access to the Site, at any time, at our discretion and without notice. We expect to do this mainly where someone seriously or repeatedly breaks these Website Terms or our Community guidelines, where we need to protect other people, the Site or the authors, where the law requires it, or where we suspect fraud or misuse. We will usually explain what we have done and why where we can, but we do not promise to. You can ask us to look at a decision again, but we are not obliged to change it.
9.2 You may close your account at any time from your account page. Our Privacy notice explains how account deletion works, including the short review and waiting period and what is deleted, anonymised or kept.
9.3 Closing an account does not affect orders you have already placed, your legal rights, or any clause of these Website Terms that is meant to continue.
10. Our responsibility for loss or damage
10.1 If you are a consumer, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these Website Terms or our failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss or damage that is not foreseeable. We provide the Site for domestic and private use, and we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption or loss of business opportunity.
10.2 Nothing in these Website Terms excludes or limits our liability where it would be unlawful to do so, including for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for damage to your device or digital content caused by digital content we supplied where we failed to use reasonable care and skill.
10.3 Subject to clause 10.2, and because the Site is provided free of charge, our total liability to you for loss or damage arising from your use of the Site, other than in connection with a purchase (which is governed by our Terms of sale), is limited to £100.
10.4 If you use the Site for business purposes, we exclude all implied conditions, warranties and representations to the extent the law allows, and we are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss, or loss of profit, revenue, business or goodwill.
11. Changes to these terms
11.1 We may change these Website Terms. If a change significantly affects account holders, we will tell you by email or on the Site at least 30 days before it takes effect, unless it is needed sooner for legal or security reasons. If you do not agree, you may close your account before the change takes effect. If you keep using the Site after that, the new terms apply.
12. Law and courts
12.1 These Website Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. You can bring legal proceedings in the courts of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your home courts and you keep the protection of any mandatory consumer law of the part of the United Kingdom where you live.
12.2 If a court finds part of these Website Terms unlawful, the rest continue in force. If we delay enforcing them, we can still enforce them later. No one other than you and us has any right to enforce them. We may transfer our rights and obligations under them to another organisation.