Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between you and Literally Books Ltd (company number 17407736), a company registered in England and Wales with its registered office at 66 Paul Street, London, England, United Kingdom, EC2A 4NA, trading as “Literally”. By creating an account you accept them, along with our Privacy Notice.

You must be 16 or over to have an account. We ask for your date of birth at signup and apply the rule there.

Literally is offered in the United Kingdom. We are not currently offering it to readers elsewhere, and it is not aimed at or marketed to them. You may find the site reachable from abroad, and you will not lose your account by travelling — but the service, its prices and these terms are written for the UK.

Keep your login details to yourself; you are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us if you think someone else has gained access to your account.

Choose a username and display name that are not misleading — do not pretend to be someone else, and do not imply you are an author, publisher or bookshop unless you are and we have verified it.

Literally is a place to talk about books. Disagreeing about a book is welcome; the rest of this section is not.

Do not post anything illegal, abusive, harassing, hateful, sexual, or sexual involving children. Do not threaten people. Do not post someone else's private information. Do not spam, scrape, or run automated tools against the site. Do not post other people's copyrighted text as though it were yours — a quotation in a review is fine, a chapter is not.

Mark spoilers. The Spoiler Shield only works if people use it honestly, and deliberately spoiling books for others is a reason to lose your account.

Your reviews, posts and replies remain yours. You give us a non-exclusive licence to store and display them on Literally so that the service can work — showing your review on a book's page, your post in someone's feed. That licence is limited to running and promoting the service, and it ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies already made in backups or required by law.

You keep the right to be identified as the author of what you write.

Everything posted on Literally is checked automatically before it appears. That check is performed by a third-party service which scores text for harmful content — named, with what it receives, in our Privacy Notice. Material that scores badly may be blocked, hidden or queued for a person to look at. We also keep a trust score for each account, based on how its content has scored over time, which affects how strictly new posts are treated.

Automated checks get things wrong, and we treat that as expected rather than exceptional. Whenever something you wrote is removed — by the automated check or by one of us — we tell you, and what we send you says what was removed, what was wrong with it, which rule we applied, and whether a machine or a person made the decision. You can always ask a person to look again.

We may remove content or suspend an account that breaks these terms, and we may do so without notice where the content is clearly illegal or harmful.

If you see something that breaks these terms, report it. Posts, replies, and messages in book clubs have a report control, and reports reach us directly.

If we remove something you wrote, you can appeal. The notice we send you links to a page explaining the decision, with a box to tell us why you think we got it wrong. A person reviews every appeal — never the automated system that made the original call — and we write back with our answer and our reasons. If we agree with you, your content goes back up.

Appealing is free, and you have six months from the decision to do it. You can appeal once per decision.

Using our appeal process does not take away any of your other rights. You can still take a complaint to a court, and you do not have to appeal to us first.

Literally is free to use. Some features are part of a paid subscription, billed through Stripe, which renews automatically until you cancel. The price and the billing period are shown on the plan you choose, before you pay.

Your 14-day right to change your mind. As a consumer you have 14 days from the day your subscription starts to cancel it, for any reason and without having to explain yourself. This is your statutory right of withdrawal under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.

We ask you to tick a box at checkout confirming that you want your subscription to start straight away. Ticking it does not give up your right to cancel. What it means is that if you do cancel inside the 14 days, we can charge you for the part of the period you have already had, and refund the rest. If you cancel before using any of it, you get everything back.

To use the right, cancel your subscription within the 14 days. You can do this through your account settings, or by sending an email to to Support@literallyapp.com. You do not have to use a particular form of words.

Cancelling after that. You can cancel at any time from Settings, in two clicks, without contacting us. Your subscription then stops renewing and you keep Premium until the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not refund part-periods once the 14 days have passed, unless something has gone wrong on our side — in which case your statutory rights apply as normal and nothing here limits them.

We will provide the service with reasonable care and skill. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we are not responsible for what other readers post — though we will act on it when it is reported.

Book information comes from open catalogues and other sources and may be incomplete or wrong. Where we link to an external retailer, any purchases made are between you and the retailer. Literally may receive a commission on any purchases you make from our referrals.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, and if you are a consumer your statutory rights are unaffected by anything written here.

You can delete your account at any time from Settings. We may suspend or close an account that repeatedly or seriously breaks these terms; where we do, we will tell you why unless we are prevented from doing so.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of any mandatory consumer law that applies where you live.

We will update the date at the top when these terms change. If a change materially affects your rights, we will tell you before it takes effect and give you the chance to close your account if you do not accept it.