The rules of the House

When you create a character you agree to these terms and to the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to them, do not create one.

You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you need a parent or guardian’s permission.

One person, one character. Do not make an account for someone else, or hold several to inflate a house’s standing.

Guard your passphrase. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you. Tell us at once if you think someone else has got in.

Halls, circles, whispers, vows, thoughts and book notes are all yours. You keep every right in them. You give us only the permission we need to store them and to show them to the readers you meant them for.

Do not use the House to:

• ✦Harass, threaten, demean, or follow another reader about.
• ✦Post anything unlawful, hateful, or sexual involving minors.
• ✦Spam the halls, advertise, or run a scheme of any kind.
• ✦Impersonate another reader, or a keeper of the House.
• ✦Break, scrape, overload, or work around any part of the service.
• ✦Share anything you have no right to share.

The House filters some of this automatically and the rest by hand. We may remove anything that breaks these rules and, where it is repeated or serious, end a membership without notice.

Pages, streaks, quests and honours are worth having only because they are true. Do not invent pages you have not read to climb the standings. We may correct or remove counts we believe were not earned.

Book details and cover images come from Open Library and belong to their respective rights holders. We show them so you can find what you are reading; we make no claim to them and cannot vouch for their accuracy.

Everything you earn in the House is decoration. XP, levels, streaks, honours, chests and seasonal themes have no monetary value, cannot be bought, sold or transferred, and are not property. We may adjust how they are earned, or retire a season, as the House changes.

Nothing in the shop is for sale yet. Saving something to your wishlist is an expression of interest, not an order and not a promise of price or availability. If we ever begin selling, we will publish separate terms for it before you can buy anything.

Membership costs nothing. In return, the service is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind. We do not promise it will always be available, always be correct, or never lose anything — though we will try hard on all three.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the House. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

Keep your own copy of anything you would be sorry to lose.

You may leave whenever you like by deleting your account at the foot of your own page. That erases what clause 8 of the Privacy Policy describes, immediately and for good.

We may suspend or end a membership that breaks these rules, or close the service entirely — in which case we will give as much warning as we reasonably can.

We may revise these terms. If a change is significant we will say so in the House, and continuing to use it afterwards means you accept the revision.

Write to us with Send word to the keepers at the top of your own page, or at keepers@houseofareader.com.