This page describes what we're trying to do and the rules we've put in place (for ourselves and our readers and publishers) to accomplish that. It has absolutely no legal weight, which all resides in the terms of service, the privacy policy, and the copyright policy together with any individual contracts or agreements with authors, publishers, or other individuals or organizations.
This page does, however, have moral weight for us and if you have suggsestions for better aligning our policies with our goals, send us your ideas. We seriously consider all reasonable suggestions.
We're trying to encourage the everyday magic that happens when communities engage around ideas and visions, especially those manifested as texts which take more than five minutes to read. Books have always been social (even if only between author and reader) and we want to sustain and enhance those connections as books become electronic.
We want to support and sustain the writers, artists, and publishers who create or refine the content which enables this kind of magic in the first place. George Fox, one of the founders of the Quaker movement, told his followers to "be patterns, be examples." We are trying to be an example of what publishing could be like in the 21st century.
We're also running a business which needs to be self-sustaining and we'd like to be independent. That means support for the infrastructure we provide, salaries for the people who work for us, donations for the people or organizations who work with us, and returns for the investors who enable us to take risks we couldn't otherwise consider.
Given these goals, we've formulated some simple rules which have been rendered as various legalia, particularly our terms of service, privacy policy, copyright policy.
Unless otherwise noted, the contents of this site are copyrighted and we ask that you not redistribute them without permission (which you'll probably get). Note that a lot of our code and content already has open source or Creative Commons licenses and we try to mark it as such.
We believe in and honor copyright as a way to encourage creators and to help them sustain themselves and the work they are creating. All sBooks are free of technical DRM and we ask that you not take advantage of that fact by illegally redistributing copyrighted content to others. If you do, we will do what we can (or must, legally) to help the owners protect their interests.
When you use sBooks to enrich a book, you own any original content you provide, including the notes you add, the tags you apply, the files you upload, and the links you make. We ask that you not upload content to which you don't have rights (and we will remove it if requested by a valid rights holder). As owner of the enriching content (glosses) you have created, you give us the right to make them available to other users of the site based on your actions and preferences. You also give us the right to make whatever internal copies, abstracts, or transformations are neccessary for the operation of the site and service.
You can get a dump of all your notes, tags, and links in a processing-friendly XML format. and leaving (though we hope not). At your request, we can delete everything you have added as well, as everything we know about you.
When you add a gloss to a passage in a book, the gloss will be visible to your personal circle (basically, your friends), any co-readers for the particular book, and the readers of any overlay you have specified. You can keep a gloss from being visible to your personal circle or co-readers by declaring it private, though it will still be visible to readers of overlays you have specified.
You have the right to delete anything you have added. If someone else has referenced something which you've deleted, users will see a message that the content has been “redacted” but your name won't be mentioned (though the user who referenced it might identify you in some way).
We will not share any of your personal information with any users whom you have not authorized, either explicitly or by granting them access to content you have created. When you have associated your sBooks identity with external social networks, we will honor their privacy policies and not share that information either. If you disassociate from a social network, we will erase everything we learned from your association.