Terms of Service

01This agreement

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) form a binding agreement between you and Ahmed Labeb Alashari of Baghdad, Iraq (“Maktabaty”, “we”, “us”). They govern your use of the website at maktabaty.app, the Books Reader for web and Android, the Authors & Publishers portal, the Story Studio authoring tool, and any other service we offer that links to them (together, the “Platform”).

By creating an account, buying a book, or otherwise using the Platform, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Platform.

Our Privacy Policy forms part of this agreement and explains how we handle your personal data.

02Who may use Maktabaty

You must be at least 13 years old, or the age of digital consent where you live if that is higher, to hold your own account. If you are under the age of majority in your country, you may use the Platform only with the involvement of a parent or guardian, who accepts these Terms on your behalf.

If you accept these Terms for an organisation — a publishing house, a school, a company — you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means that organisation.

You may not use the Platform if we have previously terminated your account, or if applicable sanctions or export-control law prohibits it.

03Your account

You need an account to buy or read books. You may create one with an email address and password, or by signing in with Google.

You agree to give accurate information, to keep it current, and to keep your credentials secret. You are responsible for what happens under your account, except where it results from our own failure. Tell us promptly at maktabaty@maktabaty.app if you believe your account has been compromised.

One person, one account. Do not share credentials, and do not let others use your library as a way around buying their own copy.

04Buying a book

What you receive

When you buy a book, you receive a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to download, store and read that book on devices you control, for your own personal and non-commercial use, for as long as your account remains open. You are not buying the copyright, and you are not buying a transferable copy.

Prices, currency and tax

Prices are shown before you confirm a purchase and include any tax we are required to collect. We may change prices at any time, but never for a purchase you have already made.

Payment

Payments are handled by a third-party payment processor. Your card details go to them, not to us. You confirm you are authorised to use the payment method you provide.

Refunds and the right to cancel

Digital books are delivered immediately, and in many jurisdictions that ends a statutory right to cancel once you begin reading. Independently of that, we will refund a purchase within 14 days where the book is faulty, materially not as described, or was bought in error and has not been substantially read. Write to maktabaty@maktabaty.app. Nothing here removes a non-waivable consumer right you have under your local law.

If a book is withdrawn

An author or publisher may stop offering a title. If that happens, your existing licence survives: a book you have bought stays in your library and remains readable. If we are ever legally compelled to remove a title you own — a court order, or a proven copyright claim — we will tell you and refund what you paid for it.

05Rules for readers

You agree not to:

• copy, redistribute, publish, sell, rent, sub-licence or publicly perform any book, except as the law expressly permits regardless of contract;
• remove, disable or circumvent any technical protection, watermark or access control;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any part of the Platform, except to the extent that restriction is unenforceable where you live;
• scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the catalogue or its content by automated means;
• use the Platform to train a machine-learning model on the works it delivers, without the rightsholder's written permission;
• probe, load-test, or interfere with the Platform, or attempt to gain access to any account, system or data that is not yours;
• use the Platform for anything unlawful, or in breach of anyone's rights.

Genuine, good-faith security research is welcome. Report what you find to maktabaty@maktabaty.app and give us reasonable time to fix it before disclosing; we will not pursue you for research conducted that way.

06Authors and publishers

You keep your copyright

You retain all ownership of the work you publish through Maktabaty. We claim no share of your copyright and take no equity in your rights.

The licence you grant us

To let us actually operate a bookshop, you grant Maktabaty a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence, for the period your work is published on the Platform, to host, store, back up, reproduce, reformat, transcode, adapt for display, transmit, communicate and distribute your work to users, and to use your title, cover art, author name and an excerpt for the purpose of promoting your work and the Platform. This licence exists so we can deliver and market your book, and for no other purpose. It ends when you withdraw the work, save for the wind-down below.

What you promise us

• You own or control all rights in the work, including every image, video, font, sound and quotation inside it, and you have all permissions and releases needed for any person identifiable in it.
• The work does not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity or other rights.
• The work is not defamatory, and does not breach any law that applies to it.
• The information you give us — your identity, your rights, your tax and payout details — is true.

Content standards

You may not publish material that sexualises minors; that incites violence or hatred against people on the basis of a protected characteristic; that provides instruction for terrorism or serious violent crime; that is designed to defraud; that contains malware; or that is otherwise unlawful. We may also decline material that is plagiarised, spam, or deliberately mislabelled.

Review and removal

We may review submissions and may refuse, delist, or remove a work that breaches these Terms. Except where the law or an urgent safety risk requires immediate action, we will tell you which term is at issue and give you an opportunity to respond or to correct it.

Royalties and payment

Your revenue share, payment schedule, minimum payout threshold and reporting will be set out in an Author Agreement presented to you in the Authors portal before you publish commercially. Until that agreement is published, no revenue share is in force and nothing on the Platform is offered for sale. Where that agreement and these Terms conflict on a commercial point, the Author Agreement governs.

You are responsible for your own taxes. We will withhold only where the law obliges us to.

Withdrawing a work

You may withdraw a work at any time. We will stop offering it for sale within 7 days. Readers who already bought it keep their licence and their copy, and we keep the file only for that purpose — which is the wind-down referred to above.

07Copyright complaints

If you believe something on Maktabaty infringes your copyright, write to maktabaty@maktabaty.app with:

• your name and contact details;
• identification of the work you say is infringed;
• identification of the material on Maktabaty you say infringes it, with enough detail to find it;
• a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by the rightsholder or the law;
• a statement that the information is accurate and that you are the rightsholder or authorised to act for them;
• your signature, electronic or physical.

We will act on valid notices promptly, and we will tell the publisher what was removed and why. They may send a counter-notice, and if they do we may restore the material unless you begin legal proceedings. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

Do not send a notice in bad faith. Misrepresentation carries liability for costs and damages under the copyright law of several countries.

08Our intellectual property

The Platform itself — its software, design, the .mbook format, the Maktabaty name, logo and other brand features — belongs to us or our licensors, and is protected by copyright, trademark and other law. These Terms give you no right to use our brand features beyond identifying the Platform fairly and accurately.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them freely and without obligation to you. We would rather have your ideas than a legal argument about them.

09Third-party services

Signing in with Google is subject to Google's own terms and privacy policy. Payment is subject to the processor's terms. Books may contain links to third-party sites, which we do not control and are not responsible for.

10Availability and changes

We aim to keep the Platform available and working, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may carry out maintenance, and we may change, add or remove features.

If we decide to discontinue the Platform altogether, we will give you at least 60 days' notice and a means of downloading the books in your library before it closes.

11Suspension and termination

You may close your account at any time, from the app or by writing to us.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, if we are legally required to, or to protect the Platform or its users from harm. Except in urgent cases we will give you notice and, where the breach can be fixed, a chance to fix it.

If we terminate your account other than for your breach, we will refund any unused prepaid amount. Sections 8, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 survive termination.

12Disclaimers

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Platform is provided “as is” and “as available”, and we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Platform will meet your requirements, that it will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, or that any content is accurate. Books are written by their authors, and their content is theirs, not ours.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties. Where that is so, this section applies only as far as their law permits, and your non-waivable consumer rights are unaffected.

13Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill or business interruption, however caused and on any theory of liability;
• our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Platform is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or USD 100.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that applicable law does not permit us to exclude. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

These limits reflect the allocation of risk between us and are a basis on which the Platform is offered at its price.

14Indemnity

If you publish through Maktabaty, or use the Platform in business, you agree to indemnify and hold us harmless against claims, damages, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from the work you publish, from your breach of these Terms, or from your infringement of anyone's rights.

We will tell you promptly of any such claim, let you control the defence of it with counsel of your choice, and give you reasonable cooperation. You may not settle in a way that imposes an obligation on us without our consent.

This section does not apply to consumers using the Platform purely to read.

15Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that if you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live, and may bring proceedings there.

Before starting formal proceedings, please write to maktabaty@maktabaty.app. Most disputes are a misunderstanding, and we would rather resolve it in a week by email than in a year by litigation. Either of us may seek injunctive relief at any time to protect intellectual property.

16General

• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and any Author Agreement are the whole agreement between us on their subject, and replace anything said earlier.
• Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger or sale of the business, on notice to you.
• Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for failure caused by events beyond reasonable control.
• No third-party rights. Nobody other than you and us may enforce these Terms.
• Notices. We will write to the email on your account; you should write to the addresses in section 18.
• Language. Where we provide a translation, the English version governs if there is a conflict.

17Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms. For any change that materially affects your rights or obligations, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email or in the app before it takes effect, and the change will not apply retroactively to purchases you have already made.

Continuing to use the Platform after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not, you may close your account, and we will refund any unused prepaid amount.

18Contact