Terms of Service

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”). By creating an account you accept these Terms and confirm you have read our Privacy Policy. We record which version you accepted and when.

If you use X-Live Books as a consumer, nothing in these Terms takes away rights the law gives you that cannot be excluded by contract.

• Authors must be 18 or older and must give accurate details.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account. Keep your sign-in details to yourself and tell us straight away if you think someone else has used them.
• One person or business per account. Pen names are fine; pretending to be another real person is not.

• X-Live Books has a Free plan and paid plans (Pro and Studio), billed monthly or yearly. What each plan includes and costs is shown on the pricing page and in your account when you choose it. Prices include or exclude VAT as shown at checkout.
• Free trial: a new paid subscription starts with 7 days free. You give a payment method at checkout. There is one trial per subscription: starting again after a cancellation does not give you another.
• We email you before the trial ends with the amount and the date of the first charge. If you do not cancel before the trial ends, the first charge is taken automatically on that date.
• Renewal: your subscription renews automatically at the end of each month or year, at the price shown in your account, until you cancel. We will tell you in advance of any price change, and you can cancel before it applies.
• Cancellation: you can cancel at any time from Plan & billing in your account, which opens Stripe's billing portal. Your plan stays active until the end of the period you have paid for and does not renew. We do not refund the unused part of a period, except as described below.
• Money-back guarantee: if you are not satisfied, ask us within 7 days of your first payment and we will refund it in full. The money-back guarantee does not apply to Founding Author.
• Upgrading from Pro to Studio takes effect immediately. You pay the difference for the rest of the current period straight away.
• Failed payments: if a renewal payment fails, Stripe retries it and you keep your plan for up to 16 days while you update your card. If it is still unpaid after that, your account moves to the Free plan's features.
• On the Free plan, books above the Free plan's limit are suspended, not deleted: they come back when you subscribe again. Published books stay available to readers who bought them.

If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, you may withdraw from a paid subscription within 14 days of the day you took it out, without giving a reason, by telling us at hello@xpublish.io or by cancelling in your account. Before checkout we ask you to confirm that you want your plan to start straight away and that you understand this right; we record when you confirmed and the wording you saw. If you asked for the service to start during those 14 days and we have charged you, we refund the payment minus a proportionate amount for the days used. The free trial does not shorten this period.

This right does not apply if you use X-Live Books for your business. For cover credits, see the section on cover packs.

• One cover credit pays for one cover project: the front, back and spine of one book, with every sample and change inside it, up to 15 image generations per project. The credit is used when the project starts.
• Welcome credit: 1 cover project, once per account, the first time you are on a paid plan (a free trial counts).
• Studio: 5 cover projects each billing month, for paid periods only (not during a trial). Unused monthly credits do not roll over.
• Credits are used in this order: monthly credits first, then the welcome credit, then any other credits, soonest to expire first.
• Credits have no cash value and cannot be transferred. Free credits (welcome and similar) may be paused for a day when the platform's daily capacity for free covers is reached; paid credits are never paused for this reason.

You keep all rights in the books and material you upload or create on X-Live Books (“your content”). You give XPublish a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, format, display and deliver your content, to make previews and share images from it, and to send it to the providers that run the features you use, for as long as it is on the service and afterwards for readers who bought it.

Before you publish a book you confirm that you own or have the right to publish its content, and that it complies with our content rules.

You promise that everything you upload to X-Live Books or ask it to create:

• is yours, or you have all the rights, licences and permissions needed to use it the way you do, including for text, images, fonts, music and video;
• does not use a real person's name, image, voice or likeness in a way they have not agreed to, and does not present a real person as endorsing your book;
• does not use anyone else's trademark, logo or brand in a way that could confuse people or that they have not permitted;
• does not infringe copyright, trademark, design, privacy, publicity or any other right of anyone else, and is not defamatory or unlawful.

This applies equally to what you ask our AI features to create: you are responsible for your requests (prompts, descriptions, reference images) and for the decision to use or publish the result.

You will compensate XPublish, and its directors, staff and providers, for any loss, liability, damages, costs and reasonable legal fees arising from a claim by a third party that your content, your requests, or your use of a result breaks these promises or the law. We will tell you promptly about such a claim, and let you take part in defending it.

Some features use artificial intelligence provided by third parties: Import with AI (turning a manuscript into chapters) and Narrate with AI (reading a chapter aloud). They run only when you use them.

• AI output can be wrong, incomplete or unexpected. Check it before you publish it. Imported chapters are marked “AI-imported, not reviewed” until you review them.
• As between you and XPublish, you may use the output created for you in your book, subject to these Terms. We claim no ownership of it.
• Requests and outputs are checked by the AI providers’ content filters, and a request may be refused.

• Paige Cover Artist is an AI system. When you chat with Paige, you are talking to an AI, not a person. Paige’s replies and the images she makes are generated automatically.
• Images created by Paige Cover Artist are labelled as AI-generated in your account. Do not remove or hide that label or any marking embedded in the image, and declare AI-generated artwork wherever a retailer, platform or the law requires it.
• AI-generated images are not exclusive to you: a similar image may be produced for someone else, and depending on the country, such images may not be protected by copyright.
• Requests are checked by our own rules and by the image provider’s content filter. A request may be refused, for example when it asks for a real person’s likeness or a trademark.

You must not use X-Live Books to publish, sell or create:

• content that is illegal, infringes someone else’s rights, or that you have no right to publish;
• sexual content involving minors, content that promotes violence, terrorism, drugs or weapons, or content that harasses or discriminates;
• images of real people made or changed to look authentic without their consent, or content meant to deceive readers about who wrote or endorsed a book;
• malware, spam, or anything designed to get around our limits, filters or security, including attempts to make the AI features ignore their rules.

We may remove content or suspend an account that breaks these rules. Where the law requires it, we will tell you why and how to contest the decision.

Readers buy books through a checkout run by Stripe. The author is the seller of the book and is responsible for it towards the reader. XPublish provides the platform and the checkout technology, run by Stripe on the author’s own Stripe account, and is not a party to the sale between the author and the reader. Readers get access to a book as soon as the payment succeeds, and keep it for as long as the service runs, including if the author later archives the book.

Authors can connect a Stripe account to receive payouts. Payout terms, fees and timing are set out in your account before you publish a paid book.

Readers who are consumers in the EU or UK agree, when they buy, that access starts immediately and that they therefore lose the 14-day right of withdrawal for that book.

A printed copy is produced on demand by a printing partner and shipped to the address the reader gives at checkout. The author remains the seller; XPublish arranges the printing and shipping and handles any problem with the copy on the author’s behalf.

If a copy arrives damaged, has a printing defect, is not the book ordered, or does not arrive, the reader can report it from their order page within 30 days of the shipment date, with a photo of the problem where there is one. We then send a replacement copy free of charge or refund the order in full, as the reader prefers; the reader keeps the copy received. Slight shifts of content and small variations in ink are normal in print-on-demand and are not defects.

Change of mind: a print-on-demand copy is made for one order and cannot be resold, so we do not accept returns or give refunds for a change of mind once printing has started. An order can be cancelled free of charge from the order page until printing starts.

• Anyone with an X-Live Books account may take part in our referral program: you share a personal link or QR code, and when someone you invite becomes an author and pays for a plan, they get a discount on their first payment, and, if you have joined the affiliate program, you earn a commission on what they pay for the period set out in the Program terms.
• The program is governed by the Referral program terms published at /referral (the “Program terms”), which form part of these Terms. By using your referral link you accept them. Where the Program terms and these Terms differ on the program, the Program terms apply.
• The Program terms set out who can take part, how a referral is credited, the discount, the commission rate and duration, the hold period, the minimum payout and how payouts are made.
• A referral never counts when it comes back to you: the same account, the same email inbox or the same payment card. Spam, fake accounts and paid ads that bid on our names are not allowed. If you break the Program terms we may void the commissions concerned, hold payouts while we check, and end your participation; a serious or repeated breach may also lead to suspension under “Suspension and ending the agreement”.
• A commission on a payment that is refunded, in full or in part, or disputed is voided, and a commission already paid on it may be recovered from you. A partial refund voids the whole commission.
• Commissions may be taxable income for you. You are responsible for declaring them and paying any tax due, and we may ask for tax information before paying.
• Taking part does not make you an employee, agent or partner of XPublish Ltd.
• We may change or end the program as described in the Program terms.
• If you close your account, your referral link stops working.

We work to keep X-Live Books available but cannot promise it will always be uninterrupted or error-free. Some features are new and may change. We may change or withdraw features; if a change takes away something important in a paid plan, we will tell you in advance and you may cancel.

You can stop using X-Live Books and delete your account at any time from your account settings; any paid subscription is cancelled straight away when you do, and the unused part of the current period is not refunded (if you are still within the money-back guarantee, ask us before you delete). We may suspend or close an account that seriously or repeatedly breaks these Terms, or where the law requires it, and will tell you why unless the law prevents us. If we close your account without cause, we refund the unused part of any prepaid period. Closing your account also ends your participation in the referral program, as set out in the Program terms.

We are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these Terms or of our negligence. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, for business losses (such as lost sales or profits) if you use the service as a business, or for content you or other users publish. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or anything else that cannot be limited by law. Cap for business users: the amount paid in the previous 12 months.

We may update these Terms. We will tell you by email at least 30 days before a change that affects you takes effect. If you do not agree, you can cancel before then.

These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live, and you can bring a claim in the courts there.

Questions about these Terms: hello@xpublish.io.