Terms of Service
Last updated: 26 August 2026
The short version. Read the books, keep your notes, share collections with people you choose. Don’t upload things you have no right to upload, don’t abuse other users, and don’t try to break the Service. Subscriptions renew until you cancel, and you can cancel or delete your account at any time from inside the app.
Comments and collections are written by other members, not by us. If you see something that shouldn’t be there, use Report on the comment — we review reports and remove anything that breaks the rules, usually within 24 hours — and Block to stop seeing that person straight away.
1. Agreement
These Terms of Service (“Terms”) are a contract between you and SCREAD, LLC (“SCREAD”, “we”, “us”, “our”) covering the SCREAD Books app and the website at screadbooks.screadlabs.com (together, the “Service”). By creating an account or using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.
Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information and forms part of these Terms.
2. Who may use the Service
You must be old enough to enter a binding contract where you live, or else have a parent or guardian agree to these Terms on your behalf and supervise your use. You must give accurate registration information and keep it current. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account and for keeping your password secure. Tell us promptly at hello@screadlabs.com if you believe your account has been compromised.
We ask for a date of birth during sign-up, and what happens next depends on it.
2.1 Readers aged 13 and under
A parent or guardian must approve the account before it can be finished. During sign-up we ask for a parent or guardian's email address and send a code to it. Sign-up stops there. The code is sent only to that address — it is never shown on the young reader's screen — and the account cannot be completed until the parent enters it.
To approve, the parent creates their own SCREAD Books account, which is free and requires no payment, and enters the code. Doing so means they consent to us collecting the information described in our Privacy Policy from that reader, and they accept these Terms on the reader's behalf. We email the parent again to confirm. A parent may withdraw approval at any time from Profile → Settings → Family, which stops the account.
What an approved account can do. Read the whole library, keep a shelf, and keep a reading position. Nothing about the reader is shown to anyone else: passage comments, shared collections and the member directory all stay switched off. Those features disclose personal information to other users, so they require a subscription on the approving parent's account before they become available.
2.2 Readers aged 14 to 16
You need a parent or guardian's permission. When the date of birth you give makes you 14, 15 or 16, we ask you to confirm that a parent or guardian knows you are using SCREAD Books and approves. By confirming, you state that you have their permission, and that they accept these Terms on your behalf where you are not old enough to accept them yourself.
One person, one account. Do not share your account or let anyone else use it.
3. Subscriptions and billing
3.1 Free access and paid subscriptions
You can use the app without an account. Without one you may browse the catalog and read a sample of any book.
A free account reads every book in the catalog, start to finish, at no cost. It also lets you build your own shelf, keep your reading position across your devices, and join collections and read the discussion in them.
A paid subscription adds the rest: hands-free reading, including autoscroll, tap-to-turn and Read Aloud; replying and reacting in collections; uploading or scanning your own books; and reading goals, streaks and history.
We do not currently offer a free trial of a paid subscription. A paid subscription is charged from the moment you start it. If we offer a trial or introductory offer in the future, its length and price will be stated before you agree to it.
3.2 Payment
There are two ways to subscribe, and which one you used decides who bills you.
- In the app. The subscription is an Apple in-app purchase. Apple takes the payment and bills it to your Apple Account, under Apple’s own terms.
- On our website. The subscription is sold through our payment processor, Stripe, and billed to the payment method you give Stripe.
Prices, billing period and currency are shown before you pay. Prices are not necessarily the same on both, and student pricing is only available on the website, because it depends on verifying a student email address. We do not receive or store your card number either way.
3.3 Renewal and cancellation
Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel. You may cancel at any time, and where you do it depends on where you bought it:
- Bought in the app: open Profile → Settings → Manage Subscription, which opens Apple’s subscription settings. You can also reach the same place from the iOS Settings app, under your name, in Subscriptions. Only Apple can cancel an Apple subscription; we cannot cancel it for you.
- Bought on our website: sign in at our website and open your billing settings, which take you to Stripe’s customer portal. The confirmation email we send after you subscribe links to the same place. A website subscription cannot be cancelled from inside the app, because Apple’s subscription settings do not know about it.
Cancelling stops the next renewal; your access continues until the end of the period you have already paid for. Deleting your account cancels a website subscription at the same time.
3.4 Refunds and price changes
Payments are non-refundable except where required by law or where we decide otherwise at our discretion. Cancelling part-way through a billing period does not entitle you to a partial refund. If a purchase was made through Apple’s in-app purchase system instead, Apple’s refund policy applies and refunds must be requested from Apple. We may change prices; a change takes effect at your next renewal and we will give reasonable notice first, so you can cancel before it applies.
3.5 Statutory cancellation rights
Nothing here removes any statutory right of withdrawal or cancellation you have under consumer law in your country.
4. Beta access
Parts of the Service may be offered as a beta or preview, including through access codes. Beta features are provided as-is, may change or be withdrawn at any time, and may be less reliable than the rest of the Service. Access codes are personal to you and may not be resold or published.
5. Books and content in the Service
The catalog draws on works from public sources including Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, Open Library and Wikipedia. Those works carry their own licence and terms, which continue to apply to them, and some carry attribution or redistribution requirements. Nothing in these Terms transfers ownership of any book to you.
Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service and its content for your own private reading. You may not republish, redistribute, sell, systematically download or scrape the Service or its catalog, or use it to build a competing product or to train a machine-learning model.
6. Your content
6.1 What you keep
You keep ownership of everything you create or upload — notes, comments, collections, profile picture, and any book files or scans you add. We claim no ownership of it.
6.2 The permission you give us
You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, adapt for technical purposes and display your content, solely to operate and support the Service — for example, storing your library so it syncs across your devices, or showing your comment to the members of a collection you posted it in. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in backups that have not yet aged out.
6.3 Books you upload or scan
The Service lets subscribers add their own book files and scan physical books. You are responsible for having the right to do so. By adding a book you confirm that you own the copyright, that the work is in the public domain, that you have the rights holder’s permission, or that your use is otherwise lawful where you are. Uploaded and scanned books are for your own private reading. Do not add a copyrighted book to a shared collection unless you have the right to distribute it.
6.4 Shared collections
Collections are shared with the members you invite. Anything you post in one — comments, reactions, the books you add, and your profile — is visible to those members. Treat that as public. We do not control what other members do with what they see.
7. Rules of use
You agree not to:
- post content that is unlawful, harassing, hateful, defamatory, sexually explicit, violent, or that promotes self-harm or illegal acts;
- infringe anyone’s copyright, trade mark, privacy or other rights;
- impersonate anyone, or choose a username designed to mislead;
- harass, threaten, stalk or spam other users;
- upload malware, or attempt to breach, probe, overload or circumvent the Service’s security, rate limits, entitlement checks, or access controls;
- use bots, scrapers or automated means to access the Service, except a well-behaved search-engine crawler on the public website;
- reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to derive source code from the app, except where that right cannot lawfully be excluded;
- resell, sublicense or commercially exploit the Service or access to it.
There is zero tolerance for objectionable content and for abusive behaviour towards other members. We may remove content, suspend or terminate an account, and do so without notice, for any breach of this section. We are not obliged to monitor content, but we may.
8. User content, other members, and what we are responsible for
8.1 The content is theirs, not ours
The social parts of the Service — shared collections, comments, reactions, usernames, display names, profile pictures, and books other members add — carry content created by users, not by us. We do not create, endorse, verify, adopt or take responsibility for content posted by other users, and their content does not represent our views. You use those parts of the Service, and interact with the people in them, at your own risk. We are a host and a conduit for that material, not its author or publisher.
8.2 We are not obliged to police it in advance
We do not pre-screen or approve user content before it appears. We operate a reporting system (below), and we may review, refuse, remove, edit or restrict any content at any time, at our sole discretion and with or without notice. Doing so in some cases does not oblige us to do so in others, and does not make us responsible for content we did not remove.
The app also offers an optional Hide strong language setting, which masks swearing in members’ comments on your own device. It is a display preference you control, off unless you turn it on at Profile → Settings. It is not a guarantee: it works from a word list, it does not catch every spelling or language, and it does not filter images, links or the text of books.
8.3 Reporting objectionable content and abusive users
Every comment in a shared collection carries a Report action, and members can be blocked from the same menu. Blocking takes effect immediately: you and the blocked member stop seeing each other’s comments and reactions. Reports can also be sent to hello@screadlabs.com.
We aim to review every report and remove content that breaches these Terms within 24 hours, and we will eject users who repeatedly or seriously breach them.
8.4 Disputes between members
You are solely responsible for your dealings with other members. If a dispute arises between you and another member, you release SCREAD, its officers, employees and agents from all claims, demands and damages of every kind arising out of or connected with that dispute. We have no obligation to become involved, but may do so at our discretion.
8.5 Content you post is your responsibility
You are solely responsible for the content you post and for any consequence of posting it, including any claim brought by another user or a third party. The indemnity in section 14 applies to it.
9. Copyright complaints
If you believe material on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice to hello@screadlabs.com including: your contact details; identification of the work; identification of the material and where it is; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised; a statement that the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act for the rights holder; and your signature. We will remove or disable material where appropriate and may terminate repeat infringers’ accounts. You may send a counter-notice if you believe material was removed in error.
10. Availability and changes
We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the Service. We aim to give reasonable notice of a material change that disadvantages paying subscribers, and if we discontinue a paid Service entirely we will refund the unused part of a period you have paid for. The Service may be unavailable during maintenance or because of events beyond our control.
11. Ending your account
You may stop using the Service at any time and delete your account from Profile → Settings → Delete Account. Deletion is immediate and irreversible: it removes your profile, reading data, notes, collections you own, comments and reactions, and cancels any active subscription. It does not by itself refund amounts already paid.
We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, or if continuing would create risk or legal exposure for us or other users. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to put it right.
12. Disclaimers
The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that content will be accurate or complete.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you, and nothing here limits rights you have as a consumer that cannot lawfully be excluded.
13. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, SCREAD will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising out of or relating to the Service, whether based in contract, tort, or any other theory, even if advised of the possibility.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, SCREAD will not be liable for content posted by other users, for the conduct of any user of the Service, whether online or offline, or for any loss or harm arising from your reliance on, or interaction with, either.
Our total liability for all claims relating to the Service in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period, or fifty US dollars.
Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.
14. Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold SCREAD harmless from claims, damages and reasonable legal costs arising from your content, your use of the Service, or your breach of these Terms or of anyone’s rights — in particular any claim arising from a book you uploaded or scanned, from anything you posted in a shared collection, or from your dealings with another member. This does not apply to the extent the claim results from our own wrongdoing.
15. Apple
Where you obtained the app from the App Store: these Terms are between you and SCREAD, not Apple, and Apple is not responsible for the app or its content. Apple has no obligation to provide support or maintenance. If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty you may notify Apple for a refund of the purchase price, if any, and Apple has no other warranty obligation. Apple is not responsible for addressing claims about the app, including product liability, legal-compliance or intellectual-property claims. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you.
16. Governing law and disputes
Not yet settled — must be completed before launch. The governing law, the venue for disputes, and whether SCREAD requires arbitration with a class-action waiver are business and legal decisions that depend on where SCREAD, LLC is registered. They have been left blank deliberately rather than guessed at, because an arbitration clause that is drafted or presented incorrectly is commonly held unenforceable, and naming the wrong jurisdiction is worse than naming none. Have counsel complete this section.
These Terms are governed by the laws of ______________, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Disputes will be resolved in ______________. If you are a consumer resident in the EU or UK, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of your country of residence and may bring proceedings there.
17. General
- Changes. We may update these Terms. We will post the revised version here with a new date, and where the change is material we will give notice in the app or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the revised Terms.
- Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service.
- Severability. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
- No waiver. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.
- Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger or sale of assets.
18. Contact
SCREAD, LLC
hello@screadlabs.com