Terms of service

Your account

You need an account with a working email address. Keep your password to yourself; you are responsible for what happens under your account. One account is for one person. You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live.

Your catalogue belongs to you

Everything you catalogue stays private to your account. We do not sell it, publish it, or show it to other customers. You can export your whole catalogue at any time, on any plan, including after a subscription ends. We will never hold your own records hostage.

Reference facts about a released title — the year, the genre, the cast, the publisher — are not personal to you, so we keep one shared record of them and reuse it for everyone who owns that title. Your copies, notes, conditions and collections are not shared.

Free days, free plan and subscriptions

New accounts get 30 days of the full service without entering payment details. After that, a subscription costs $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year, billed in advance and renewing automatically until you cancel.

Without a subscription you keep a permanently free plan: browse, organise, edit, add items by hand and export. Photo scanning, automatic details, cover art and asking questions about your collection need a subscription. We never charge per item catalogued.

Cancel any time from your account page. You keep full access until the end of the period you have already paid for, and we do not pro-rate part-months. Payments are handled by Stripe; we never see or store your card number. Prices can change with at least 30 days' notice by email, and the change never applies to a period you have already paid for.

Accuracy of automatic details

Shelfmark gathers details from public sources and checks them before saving. It still gets things wrong sometimes, especially on obscure editions. Every automatically filled field can be corrected by you, and your corrections are never overwritten. Do not rely on Shelfmark for insurance valuations or legal records.

Fair use

Do not attempt to reach other customers' libraries, scrape the service, resell it, or use it to catalogue material that is illegal to possess where you live. We may suspend an account that does. Automated bulk use beyond ordinary personal cataloguing needs our written agreement.

Ending the agreement

You can delete your account at any time from your account page; that removes your library, your profile and your sign-in permanently, and cannot be undone, so export first if you want a copy. We can end an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, and will give you a reasonable chance to export unless the law prevents it.

The legal bits

The service is provided as it is. We do our best to keep it available and accurate, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. To the extent the law allows, our liability to you is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits rights you have that cannot be limited by contract.

If we change these terms in a way that materially affects you, we will email you before it takes effect. Continuing to use Shelfmark after that means you accept the new terms.