Terms of Service

By creating an account or using Shelfsort, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the service.

• You must be at least 13 years old.
• You must provide an accurate email address that you control.
• One account per person, please.
• You’re responsible for keeping your password safe; if you suspect your account has been accessed by someone else, reset your password and email hello@shelfsort.com.

Shelfsort is for organizing your own personal ebook library and sharing reading lists with friends. We trust you to act in good faith. Specifically:

You may:

• Upload EPUB / PDF / MOBI files of books you legally own, fanfiction you wrote or downloaded for personal reading (e.g. AO3 downloads), and your own original work.
• Use the AI to categorize your library by fandom, generate cover art for personal use, and build smart shelves.
• Share book lists with friends inside the in-app book clubs and via the public reading-profile pages.
• Publish AI-generated cover art to the public cover archive, where other readers can react to it.

You may not:

• Upload books you don’t have a legal right to a personal copy of, or use Shelfsort to redistribute commercial ebooks to people who haven’t bought their own copy.
• Use Shelfsort to host or distribute material that sexualizes minors, incites violence, or violates someone else’s privacy (e.g. doxxing).
• Submit AI cover prompts containing real people’s names + sexual content, real-person harassment material, or prompts targeting protected characteristics.
• Spam suggestion boards, harass other users, brigade book-club rooms, or impersonate other people.
• Scrape or bulk-download other users’ content (their libraries, their public profiles, the cover archive) via automated tools.
• Reverse-engineer the service, attempt to access another user’s account without permission, or interfere with the platform’s normal operation.

Violations of this section may result in a temporary or permanent account suspension. For most cases we’ll email you first and ask; for sexual content involving minors we will not warn first — the account is removed and the matter referred where required by law.

You own everything you upload. By uploading, you grant Shelfsort a limited, non-exclusive license to store, process, and display your content back to you and to anyone you explicitly share it with — for the purpose of providing the service.

We don’t sell your content, train models on it, or display ads against it.

AI-generated covers: the AI cover artwork you generate via the in-app tool is yours to use personally. Commercial use of AI-generated images is governed by the underlying model’s terms (Google’s for Nano-Banana); we suggest checking those if you plan to use a generated cover commercially. The cover archive on shelfsort.com is curated for community browsing under our license, not commercial redistribution.

If you believe content on Shelfsort infringes your copyright, please email hello@shelfsort.com with:

• Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed.
• The URL or location of the allegedly infringing material on Shelfsort (book ID, cover ID, or username + book title).
• Your contact information.
• A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.
• Your physical or electronic signature.

We respond to valid notices within 7 days. Note that most Shelfsort uploads are private library content visible only to the uploader; DMCA notices for private content can only be verified after we ask the uploader to attest to the source.

You can leave at any time. Account → “Delete account” removes your library, your uploaded files, your public profile, and your account row within 30 days.

We can terminate your account if you materially violate §3 (Acceptable Use), if your account is dormant for 24 months with zero activity (we’ll email you first), or if the service is shutting down (we’ll give 90 days’ notice and an export link).

Shelfsort is provided “as is.” The AI classification is best-effort — sometimes it sorts Stargate into Star Wars, that’s the price of statistical inference. We don’t guarantee uptime, uninterrupted access, or that the service will be free of errors. We don’t guarantee that any specific AI feature will exist forever — if a provider changes their pricing past sustainability, we may retire that feature with notice.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Shelfsort and its operator are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from your use of the service. For direct damages, our total liability is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months preceding the claim — which, given Shelfsort is currently free, is functionally zero.

None of the above limits liability for fraud, willful misconduct, or anything else that can’t legally be excluded.

When we update these Terms, we’ll bump the “Last updated” date at the top of the page and, for material changes, email all active accounts at least 30 days before the change takes effect. If you don’t agree with the change, you can delete your account before it takes effect and these old terms continue to apply to your prior use.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Indiana, United States. Any disputes arising from these Terms or your use of Shelfsort will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in Indiana. Nothing in this section limits any non-waivable consumer rights you have under the law of your country of residence.

hello@shelfsort.com

Reachable for questions about these Terms, accessibility, or anything else.