Privacy policy
Last updated 2026-09-20.
What we collect
Your email, display name and password hash when you sign up; the profile details you choose to add; your shelves, ratings, reviews, follows and edits; the pages you view (aggregated into daily counts); and payment references when you subscribe.
Why
To run your account across every country site, rank books and authors, show you relevant recommendations, pay partners for the clicks we send them, and send the emails you asked for (verification, password reset, notification digests, billing).
Cookies
A session cookie keeps you signed in on every country site. A preference cookie remembers your chosen country and language. In the EU, EEA and UK, advertising cookies are set only after you consent.
Sharing
We share data only with what it takes to run the service: the site and its database are hosted on a server we rent from Scala Hosting in Sofia, Bulgaria, and that same server sends our email, so no outside mail company handles your address. Google AdSense sees a request from your browser only on country sites that show ads, and in the EU, EEA and UK only after you consent. We never sell personal data. BooksCentral is run from Pakistan, which is outside the EEA, so the people who administer the service read it from there.
Your rights
Export your shelves and reviews as CSV from your reading stats page. Ask hello@bookscentral.org to correct or delete your account; deletion removes your personal details and keeps contributions under an anonymous name, as the terms allow.
Retention
Sessions expire after 30 days of inactivity. Moderator application documents are deleted 30 days after the decision. Affiliate click logs keep a hashed session identifier for 13 months for partner reconciliation.