Privacy Policy

X-Live Books is run by XPublish Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales(company number 14995538), whose registered office is at Unit 12A, Brickfields Industrial Estate, Finway Road, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, HP2 7QA, United Kingdom(“XPublish”, “we”). We are the controller of the personal data described in this policy. You can reach us about privacy at hello@xpublish.io; general support is at hello@xpublish.io.

This policy covers the X-Live Books website and apps on xpublish.io and its subdomains: the author workspace, the reader, book sales pages and the landing pages.

From authors:

• Account details: email address, name, password (stored hashed by our sign-in provider), language, and the declaration that you are 18 or older.
• Which version of our Terms and this Privacy Policy you accepted when you signed up, and when.
• Author profile and pen names, social links and anything else you add to your author page.
• Your books: manuscripts you upload, chapters, covers, images, audio and video, and the settings of each book.
• Subscription and billing records: your plan, its status and dates, and the identifiers Stripe gives us. We never see or store your full card number.
• When you take out a subscription: the time you confirmed, before checkout, that you want it to start straight away and understood your right to withdraw, and which wording you confirmed.
• If you set up payouts: the status of your Stripe Connect account. Stripe collects your identity and bank details directly.
• Use of AI features: how much of each monthly allowance you have used, and the credits in your cover credit ledger.
• Which Ask Paige help questions you open. In your workspace Ask Paige gives pre-written answers; you cannot type free text into it.

From readers:

• Account details when you claim a book: email address, name and language.
• Which version of our Terms and this Privacy Policy you accepted when you created your account, and when.
• Purchases: which book you bought, when, the amount, and the email used at checkout.
• Reading data: your reading position, bookmarks and reading settings.
• Clicks on an author’s calls to action inside a book, linked to your account if you are signed in.
• Whether you play the audio and video in a book’s chapters: when playback starts and whether it reaches a quarter, half, three quarters and the end, linked to your account if you are signed in. Nothing is recorded when your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, and no cookie is used for it.
• Your marketing choices for each author and for XPublish, with the date and the version of the wording you agreed to.
• If you save a book for offline reading, the copy is stored only on your device, in your browser’s storage. We do not receive a list of what you saved. Your reading position and the reader page itself are not part of the copy.

From every visitor:

• Technical data needed to serve the site, such as IP address and browser details. We use your IP address for a few minutes at most to limit abuse and to count a visit to a share link once: in server memory, or as a rate-limit counter that expires with its window. We do not store it in our database.
• Error reports, if something breaks in your browser or on our servers (see Sentry below). These carry no account id, email or IP address.
• How you arrived at a book page, as the referring site or a tag in the link. This is stored without your IP address.
• Your answers to the two questions on our landing page (where your book is, what it is about), with the page, language, referring site, link tags, device type and day, and whether you then started or completed a signup in the same browser tab. They are anonymous: no cookie, IP address, email or account is stored with them, only a random id kept in your browser tab until you close it. Nothing is recorded when your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. The daily records are deleted after 13 months; only monthly totals are kept.
• If you chat with Paige on our landing pages: the questions you type and her answers, with the page language and a random id for that conversation, never a cookie, IP address or account. To answer, your question is sent with our own page content to Anthropic. If you use the chat's "Write to us" form: your name, email address and message, sent to our team by email (Resend) so we can reply. If you open WhatsApp from the chat we record only that you opened it; what you write there is handled by WhatsApp under its own terms. All of this is deleted after 13 months.

• To provide the service you signed up for: your account, your books, publishing and selling them, delivering books to readers, and the features of your plan. Basis: performance of our contract with you.
• To take payments, run subscriptions and keep accounting records. Basis: contract, and our legal obligations on tax and accounting.
• To send service emails: sign-in codes, purchase confirmations, billing notices and trial reminders, and, after the first book you buy or claim, one welcome email explaining how to read on every device and offline. Basis: contract.
• To run the AI features you choose to use (see “AI features” below). Basis: contract, because you ask for each one.
• To keep the service secure and working: rate limits, abuse prevention, error monitoring and measuring the cost of AI features. Basis: our legitimate interest in a working and affordable service.
• To protect the service and prevent misuse, we log account activity and security events: which pages and features a signed-in account requested and when, the country and kind of device, and requests our protections refused. Metadata only, never the content of your books or messages, and only requests that reach our servers: we cannot see what happens inside your own browser. Basis: our legitimate interest in a secure service.
• To show authors how their books perform (arrivals per link, calls-to-action clicked, audio and video played). Basis: our legitimate interest, and the author’s, in understanding readership.
• To send marketing emails from an author or from XPublish, only if you opted in. Basis: your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.

Some features send your content to third-party AI providers. They run only when you use them, and only for the purpose of that feature. The content is sent from our servers, not from your browser.

• Import with AI sends the text of the manuscript or chapter you import to Anthropic, which turns it into an outline and chapters.
• Narrate with AI sends the text of the chapter you choose to OpenAI, which returns narration audio. We store the audio with your book and play it to your readers.

We do not use your content, or any provider’s output, to train AI models. Under their current business terms, OpenAI and Anthropic do not use the data we send through their APIs to train their models. Providers filter requests and outputs for content they do not allow; a request they refuse is not completed.

Do not put other people’s personal data, confidential material or text you have no right to use into a manuscript, chapter or prompt. If you do, you are responsible for it (see our Terms), and we may remove it when we become aware of it.

Paige Cover Artist is an AI system that designs book covers with you in a chat. When you use it:

• Anthropic receives the book’s title, subtitle, author (pen) name, category and description, a bounded excerpt of your manuscript, and every message you type in the chat, with Paige’s replies.
• OpenAI receives the image prompt, which contains your title, subtitle and author name as written and a description of the artwork, and, when you ask for an edit, the current cover image. It receives no manuscript text and no chat messages.
• OpenAI returns the images. We store them in your account and show them to you. A cover you choose to use is published on the book’s sales page and share cards.
• Langfuse receives the model used, timings, token counts and the outcome of each AI call, with you and the conversation as one-way keyed hashes. It receives no text.

Generated images are produced by a machine. They are not exclusive to you, and a similar image may be produced for someone else. Some retailers require AI-generated cover art to be declared when you publish.

An author can turn on reviews for a book. When they do, readers who own that book, because they bought it or claimed it free, can rate it from 1 to 5 bookmarks, write a review of up to 2,000 characters if they want, and mark sentences they love. When you do, we collect:

• Your rating, the text of your review if you write one, and the dates you posted and last changed it.
• Whether you own the book through a purchase or a free claim, so we can show “Verified reader”. Nothing about the payment itself is shown.
• The sentences you mark as loved, linked to your account so you can take a heart back.
• If you are the author: your public replies to reviews, and any review you report to us, with the reason you give.

What is public: your rating, your review text, its date and your name shortened to your first name and the initial of your surname. Your full name and your email are never shown. The book’s average rating appears only once it has at least three reviews. Loved lines are shown only as a count, and only once at least three readers love the same sentence; nobody, including the author, sees who loved a line. The author sees reviews as everyone else does and can reply in public.

Moderation: the author cannot edit or delete your review, but can report it to us. We review every report and may hide a review that breaks our Terms, or keep it. A hidden review is no longer shown anywhere, and it is kept as a record of the decision. We do not filter reviews automatically.

Deleting: you can change or delete your review, and take back a loved line, at any time from the book, and they disappear straight away. You can also ask us to delete them at hello@xpublish.io. If you delete your account, your reviews, replies and loved lines are deleted with it. When you delete a review, the notification that quoted it in the author’s account is deleted too. Basis: performance of our contract with you, because you choose to post; for showing reviews to other readers and keeping moderation records, our legitimate interest in honest, verified reviews.

If you take part in the X-Live Books referral program, we process the following to run it, under the Referral Program Terms:

• Your referral link: your personal code, whether your public pages show the “Create yours” line, and the language your referral emails are sent in.
• Clicks on your link: whose link it was, the kind of link (your personal link, its QR code, the “Create yours” line on your author page, in the reader of one of your books or on a book’s sale page, the line on a shared quotation page, or a share button on your referral page), the time of the click and any campaign tags in the link. We do not store the IP address of the person who clicked.
• Referrals: which new author accounts were credited to you, when, and the link, campaign tags and time of the click that brought them.
• Commissions and payouts: each commission, the payment it comes from, its status (pending, payable, paid or voided) and the payouts sent to your Stripe Connect account.
• Tax details, only when needed: before paying you we may ask for your tax residence, tax ID or VAT number, and whether you act as a business.

If you were invited, we record the code you arrived with, the kind of link and the time of the click, so the person who invited you is credited and you receive the discount. On your device the code is kept only in the xlive-ref cookie, if you accept marketing cookies, or in the sign-up page address if you do not (see the Cookie Policy).

To prevent self-referrals, when an invited author signs up we check that they do not use the same email inbox as the person who invited them, or the same browser that person opened their referral page in (the xlive-did cookie, of which we store only a one-way hash). Each time an invited account pays, we check that the card is not one saved by the person who invited it. For the card we compare an identifier Stripe gives us (a card fingerprint), never the card number, and we do not store it.

The person who invited you sees a partly hidden version of your email address (its first three characters and the full domain, for example ann•••@example.com), the date you joined, whether you are in a trial, paying, no longer paying or not eligible, and the commission earned on each of your payments, with its date. They also receive an email, with the same partly hidden address, when you sign up and when you first pay. They never see your full email address or your payment details.

Basis: performance of the referral terms you accepted; for the self-referral checks, our legitimate interest in preventing fraud; for tax details and payout records, our legal obligations.

X-Live Books shows notifications in your account (the bell), so you know when something happens around your books:

• If you are an author: a new review of one of your books, with its rating and a short excerpt of it, and how many readers loved a sentence or a scene, with the start of that sentence. You never see who loved it.
• If you are a reader: when an author replies to your review, with a short excerpt of the reply; when a book you own is updated; and, if you follow an author, when they post news.

We store each notification with the book it is about, its type, the date, whether you have read it and, for reviews, replies and loved sentences, the excerpt. We also store your settings: which types you have muted, whether you want an email summary, in which language, the date and wording version of your consent to it, and whether your browser sent a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal when you saved them.

Email summary: off unless you switch it on in your notification settings. If you do, we email you a daily or weekly summary of your unread notifications, through Resend. Every summary has a link to switch it off, and you can switch it off in your settings at any time.

Basis: notifications in your account are part of the service you use (contract). The email summary is sent only with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.

We use the providers below to run the service. They process personal data on our instructions under data processing agreements and may not use it for their own purposes.

We also share personal data when you ask us to: with the author of a book you bought, if you opted in to hear from them; and with Stripe, which you pay directly. When a chapter contains a YouTube or Vimeo video, your browser loads it from that provider, which receives your IP address and may set its own cookies under its own policy (see the Cookie Policy).

We keep this list up to date. When we add or replace a provider, we update this page before the new provider receives personal data, and we will notify authors by email.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

Our database and application servers are in the EU (Frankfurt). Anthropic, OpenAI and Resend process data in the United States, and Stripe may. For these transfers we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission, with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension where the provider is certified. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards. Some optional features use further providers outside the UK and the EU; each one is in the table above, with where it processes, only while that feature is on.

• Your account and books: for as long as your account exists.
• Books you have published: readers who bought a book keep access to it, so a published book cannot be deleted, only archived. A book that was never published can be deleted, together with its files.
• Narration audio: with the chapter it belongs to.
• AI usage records (how much of each allowance you used): for as long as your account exists.
• Paige Cover Artist chat: each message is deleted 12 months after it was written.
• Cover images generated with Paige, including ones you did not use: for as long as your account exists. Removing a cover from a book does not delete the generated image from your account.
• Cover credits: for as long as your account exists, as the history of what you were entitled to and used.
• Purchases, invoices and billing records: for as long as the law requires us to keep accounting records, 6 years.
• Marketing choices: each choice is kept as a record of your consent, including a withdrawal, until your account is deleted.
• Reader audio and video plays: 13 months from the play, then deleted. If your account is deleted sooner, they are kept until then without any link to you.
• Ask Paige help questions opened, and reader call-to-action clicks: 13 months. If your account is deleted they are kept without any link to you.
• Statistics shown to authors are kept as monthly totals that contain no personal data, for as long as the book exists.
• Reviews and loved lines: until you delete them. If the author turns reviews off for the book, they stop being shown but are not deleted. A review we hide is kept, not shown, as a record of the moderation decision.
• Notifications: 12 months, or until your account is deleted. Notification settings and the record of your consent to the email summary: until your account is deleted.
• Referral program: the clicks on your link for 13 months. Referrals and commissions for as long as your account exists. When it is deleted, your referral code goes with it, and your referrals and commissions are deleted or, where books readers bought keep your account record, kept with that record emptied of your personal data. Payouts are kept without any link to you, as accounting records, for 6 years.
• Welcome email record: a one-way hash of your email address, the language of the email and the purchase that triggered it, so the welcome email is sent only once, kept for as long as the service runs. It does not contain your email address.
• IP addresses: not stored in our database; rate-limit counters expire within minutes. Our hosting and database providers keep short-lived access logs under their own retention.
• Error reports in Sentry: 90 days.
• Account activity and security logs: 12 months.

You can delete your account yourself at any time: in Settings if you are an author, or in My account if you are a reader. We cancel any paid subscription straight away, then delete your account data, reading data, marketing choices, author pages, books you never published with their files, your manuscripts and anything generated for you, your reviews, replies, reports and loved lines, your notifications and their settings, and every notification in someone else’s account that quotes your review or reply, and email you a confirmation. Purchase records are kept for accounting with the link to your account removed. Books you published stay archived for the readers who bought them, under the author name printed on them; the record they point to keeps none of your personal data. Content already sent to an AI provider is held by that provider under its own retention, and we cannot recall it.

You can ask us for a copy of your personal data, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive the data you gave us in a portable format. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time; every marketing email has an unsubscribe link.

You can download a copy of your data yourself, as a ZIP of JSON files: in Settings if you are an author, or in My account if you are a reader.

You can delete your whole account yourself, as described under “How long we keep it”. For anything else, write to hello@xpublish.io from the email address on your account. We answer within one month. Deleting data we have already sent to an AI provider removes it from our systems; the provider keeps its own copy only for as long as its terms allow (see “AI features”).

You can also complain to a data protection authority: in the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk), in Italy the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (garanteprivacy.it), or the authority where you live or work.

We use only essential and functional cookies. The Cookie Policy lists every cookie and browser storage entry the site uses, and why.

Data is encrypted in transit. Access to each author’s and reader’s data is enforced by database rules, private files are served through short-lived signed links, and only a small number of people at XPublish can reach production systems.

Authors must be 18 or older. The service is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16.

We will update this page when our processing changes, and change the date at the top. If a change matters to how we use your data, we will tell you by email before it takes effect.