Terms of use

These terms govern your use of Libra Esoterica — the website, catalog, community features, Pro subscription and research tools (together, “the service”). By using the service you agree to them. If you use the service on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

The privacy policy explains how we handle personal information and forms part of these terms. Where these terms say “we” or “us”, they mean the operator of Libra Esoterica.

Libra Esoterica is a discovery library: a catalog of bibliographic records about books on the occult, esoteric, paranormal and anomalous, gathered from national libraries, archives and open repositories. Every record shows the sources it was drawn from.

• Metadata is attributed, not authored. Titles, authors, dates, subjects and descriptions come from the sources listed on each record and are reproduced as found, including their errors. We do our best to merge duplicates and normalise fields, but a catalog of this size will contain mistakes. Please tell us when you find one.
• Inclusion is not endorsement. A book appears because it is relevant to a tradition or subject, not because we vouch for its claims. Nothing on the service is advice — medical, legal, financial, spiritual or otherwise.
• Access labels are informational. Where a record links to a scan or full text, the “read free” or access status reflects what the hosting source reports. It is not legal advice about copyright in your country; you are responsible for complying with the terms of the host you visit.
• Outbound links lead to sites we do not control, including library catalogs, archives, and Amazon. Their terms and privacy policies apply once you leave.

• You must be at least 16 to create an account.
• Sign-in is provided through Clerk with the social providers we enable. Keep your sign-in method secure; you are responsible for activity under your account.
• Choose a username that does not impersonate someone else or infringe a trademark. We may reclaim usernames that are inactive, misleading or abusive.
• You may delete your account at any time from account settings. We may suspend or close accounts that breach these terms, with notice where practical.

You own the reviews, ratings, tags, list titles, descriptions and notes, profile text and other material you post (“your content”). So that we can run the service, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for display (for example excerpting or reformatting), publish and distribute your content on the service and in feeds, search results, embeds and previews of it, for as long as it remains on the service. Public content may remain visible in cached copies or quotations after you delete it, but we stop distributing it ourselves.

You are responsible for your content. By posting it you confirm that you have the rights to do so and that it does not break the law or these terms. Reviews should be your own honest assessment; do not post reviews you were paid for or that you wrote about your own book without saying so.

We do not use your content to train AI models. We may use it to build features that help readers find books, such as showing tags in search or highlighting well-reviewed titles.

The service is a reading room, not a battleground. Disagreement about ideas is welcome; abuse of people is not. Do not post content that:

• harasses, threatens, or demeans a person or group, including on the basis of religion or belief;
• reveals someone’s private information without consent;
• is spam, bulk promotion, link-farming, or manipulates ratings and votes;
• infringes copyright or other rights, including reproducing substantial parts of in-copyright books;
• is sexual content involving minors, or promotes violence or self-harm;
• contains malware, phishing, or attempts to defeat the service’s security or limits.

Do not scrape the service in ways that degrade it or bypass rate limits, and do not use automated tools to create accounts or content. Public catalog data may be accessed at reasonable rates for research and personal use; contact us before any large-scale or commercial reuse.

We may remove or hide content, restrict features or close accounts that breach these terms, at our discretion and without prior notice where the harm is clear. Where we can, we will tell you what was removed and why, and you may reply through the contact details on the About page.

Copyright and rights complaints

If you believe content on the service — a review, a list, or a link to a full text — infringes your copyright or other rights, send us a notice through the contact details on the About page that includes:

1. the work you say is infringed and your right to act for its owner;
2. the exact URL(s) on the service where the material appears;
3. a statement, made in good faith, that the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent or the law;
4. a statement that the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to send it;
5. your name and a way to reach you.

We will act on complete notices promptly, tell the affected member, and consider counter-notices. Please note that links to scans hosted by libraries and archives point at those institutions; complaints about the hosted file itself should go to the host, though we will remove our link on request. Repeat infringers lose their accounts.

• What Pro is. Pro adds the AI research console, semantic search, exports and other features described on the Pro page. Features may change as the service evolves; we will not materially reduce what a paid term includes without offering a refund for the remainder.
• Billing. Subscriptions are billed in advance, monthly or yearly, through Stripe, and renew automatically until cancelled. Prices are shown before you pay; taxes may be added where required.
• Cancelling. You can cancel any time from your account’s billing settings. Access continues to the end of the paid period; there are no partial-period refunds unless the law requires them or we choose to make one.
• Fair use. Pro features have usage limits to prevent abuse (for example a daily number of research messages). Sharing an account or automating requests to exceed limits may lead to suspension.
• Failed payments. If a renewal fails, Stripe will retry; if it still fails, Pro features pause until payment succeeds.

The research console and semantic search use large language models to answer questions from catalog records and public-domain texts, with citations back to the sources it drew on. Treat the output as a research aid, not an authority:

• Answers can be wrong, incomplete or invented. Check the cited passages before relying on them.
• Citations point at catalog records and passages; the model may still summarise them inaccurately.
• Do not submit personal information about other people, or content you have no right to share.
• Output about medical, legal, financial or safety matters is not professional advice.

You may use output for personal, academic and commercial purposes, subject to any rights in the underlying sources it quotes. Your questions and the answers are stored in your account as described in the privacy policy.

Book pages link to Amazon; when the site’s Amazon Associates enrollment is active, we earn from qualifying purchases made through those links. Affiliate income does not influence which books are in the catalog, how they are ranked, or what reviewers say. Prices and availability shown on Amazon are Amazon’s and may change.

The service’s design, software, editorial text, tradition descriptions and the compilation of the catalog are ours or licensed to us. Individual bibliographic records remain the work of their sources and are used under the terms those sources publish; provenance is shown on every record. Book covers are displayed from their hosting institutions and remain subject to their rights statements.

You may link to any page and quote reasonable excerpts with attribution. Do not copy the catalog wholesale, remove attribution, or present the service as your own.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim warranties of accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, and we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of data or profits, arising from your use of the service. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim and one hundred US dollars.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, including for consumers in jurisdictions with mandatory protections.

These terms are governed by the laws of [Jurisdiction], and the courts of [Jurisdiction] have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, without prejudice to mandatory consumer-protection rules in your country of residence. Before starting formal proceedings, please contact us; most problems can be sorted out quickly.

We may update these terms as the service changes. The “last updated” date shows the current version. For material changes we will give reasonable notice on the site or by service message before they take effect; continuing to use the service after that date means you accept them. If you do not agree, stop using the service and, if you have one, cancel your subscription.

Questions about these terms, moderation decisions or rights complaints: use the contact details on the About page.