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Literature Notebook

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Help & contact

Practical answers for Literature Notebook, and a way to reach a person when they are not enough.

Notebook Free is available at no cost. Notebook Plus is $10 a month or $100 a year and Studio is $18 a month or $180 a year, each with a 7-day free trial for eligible new subscribers — one trial per account. Payments and subscription management are handled by Stripe.

Explore a sample notebook

Export your work

A complete archive of your account, from Settings.

Privacy

What we store and why.

Report a problem

Crashes, access barriers and copyright notices all come here. Signed-in account holders can send a report with diagnostics from App feedback (sign-in required). Otherwise email us below.

Who uses it

  • Students building a literature review from scholarly papers.
  • A book club member keeping notes on the current pick.
  • Someone reading a novel for pleasure who wants to remember favourite passages.
  • A writer drafting a memoir alongside the research that informs it.

Common questions

I forgot my password. What now?
Open the sign-in page and choose “Forgot your password?”. We send a reset link to your email address; opening it lets you set a new password immediately. The link is single-use and expires.
I signed up with Google. Do I have a password?
Not by default. Keep using “Continue with Google”. If you would rather sign in with a password, request a reset for the same email address and set one.
What do the plans cost?
Notebook Free is $0 and stays free. Notebook Plus is $10 a month or $100 a year. Studio is $18 a month or $180 a year. Both paid plans include exactly a 7-day free trial for eligible new subscribers, one trial per account.
How do I buy, change or cancel a paid plan?
Open Plans & billing while signed in and choose Notebook Plus or Studio. Checkout and subscription management — payment method, invoices, upgrades, downgrades and cancellation — are handled by Stripe. Literature Notebook never stores full payment-card details. Cancelling keeps your plan until the end of the period you have paid for, and your content always stays.
What do the free plan limits actually mean?
Notebook Free covers 15 active works and 3 active writing projects. Archiving a work or completing a project frees a slot and never deletes anything, so you can keep an unlimited history while staying inside the active limits.
Can I get my work out?
Yes. Settings has a full account export that produces an archive containing every record from your account plus readable Markdown for your notebooks and manuscripts. You can also export a single work or project on its own page.
How do I delete my account?
Settings has an account deletion step that requires typing a confirmation phrase. We remove your content and uploads, and aim to complete erasure within 3 days. Export first if you want a copy — deletion is not reversible.
Who can read my notebook?
Private by default. Your work is accessible through your account, except where limited support, security, infrastructure, or legal access is required, and access is enforced per row in the database rather than by the interface hiding anything.
What does Universal Search send to outside catalogues, and does it email me alerts?
Universal Search (Studio) only sends the text and filters of a search you actively trigger to the named catalogue provider you searched — never your account identity, reading notes, drafts, annotations or attachments. Nothing is called automatically on page load, and there is no general web search. Saved-search alerts are in-app only; email delivery for them is not configured.
What is the difference between My Quote Library and Quote Discovery?
My Quote Library is your own private collection: the passages you highlighted while reading plus quotes you added on their own, with source, location, category and your note. Quote Discovery (Studio, alongside Universal Search) searches quotations across connected literary and public sources — Wikiquote, Project Gutenberg and Google Books volume metadata — and labels each result by whether the passage itself was found, whether only a reference source attributes it, or whether the wording is uncertain. Nothing enters your library unless you save it, and protected full text is never reconstructed or stored.
Can I see the notebook before I sign up?
Yes. The sample notebook is read-only demonstration content — invented Fiction, Nonfiction and Scholarly works, a comparison and a sample writing project — with no account and nothing saved.

How guidance works

Guidance is the help the interface offers as you work: page introductions, field hints, examples, cautions, suggested next steps and links to definitions. It is a separate setting from notebook and writing depth — depth decides how much structure a work or project is given, guidance decides how much help you see around it. Change it in Settings under Guidance.

Three levels

Minimal
Nothing appears on its own. Help is still there whenever you ask for it, through the question-mark and definition controls.
Standard
A short introduction on each surface, brief helper text under fields, and up to three of the most useful prompts.
Detailed
Everything in Standard, plus all applicable prompts, worked examples, cautions, suggested next steps, and fuller terminology links.

Six things you can turn off

Page introductions and prompts
The short note at the top of a page explaining what it is for, together with its list of prompts.
Field hints and one-time tips
Brief helper text under fields and inputs, and the one-time tips that appear the first time you open a surface.
Worked examples
Short illustrations of what a good answer can look like.
Cautions
Notes about common mistakes, and about privacy, copyright and deletion.
Suggested next steps
Where you might go next from the page you are on.
Glossary and terminology links
Links from terms in the interface to plain-language definitions.

Relevance labels

Notebook and writing pages are marked Recommended, Optional or When applicable for the work in front of you, based on its category, type, purpose and depth. Optional pages stay closed until you open them. Nothing you have written is removed when relevance changes.

Citations and copyright

Record the source and location of every quote as you capture it — that is what makes citing it later possible. Extended quotation from a work you do not own may need permission or a fair-use basis, and that judgement is yours to make.

Resetting and replaying help

Settings has a reset that returns guidance to Standard with everything on, and brings back the one-time hints and any panels you closed. The guided tour can be replayed from the same place. The question-mark and definition controls stay available at every level, including Minimal.

Literature & writing terminology

Plain-language definitions for the words this app uses. Definition links throughout the app point back here.

52 terms

Work
The umbrella term for anything you record in the Review workspace: a book, article, poem, play, report, film or any other single piece.
Work is deliberately broad so the same notebook can hold a novel, a journal article and a policy paper without renaming anything.
Category
Fiction, Nonfiction or Scholarly. The category shapes which notebook pages and writing pages you are offered.
You can change a category later. Nothing you have already written is deleted when you do — pages that no longer apply are simply set aside.
Work type
The specific form within a category, such as Novel, Poetry, Memoir, Empirical Study or Theoretical Paper.
Work type is the strongest signal for relevance. Poetry brings in speaker, form and sound; an empirical study brings in sample, measures and analysis.
Purpose
Why you are reading this work — for enjoyment, a course, a review, research.
Purpose can pull useful pages forward even at a shallower depth. Reading to prepare a literature review, for example, brings citation-ready notes in early.
Depth
How much structure a work or project gets: Quick notes, Guided, or Comprehensive. Depth is about structure, not about how much help the interface shows.
Guidance level is the separate setting that controls help. You can run Comprehensive depth with Minimal guidance, or the other way around.
Guidance level
How much help the interface offers on its own: Minimal, Standard or Detailed. Change it in Settings under Guidance.
Relevance
Whether a page is Recommended, Optional, or shown When applicable for the work in front of you.
Recommended pages are the ones most readers of this work type use. Optional pages stay collapsed until you open them. When applicable pages appear only once the work matches their conditions.
Creator
A person or body responsible for a work — author, editor, translator, director, illustrator.
Creators are stored once and linked to each work, so a creator page gathers everything of theirs you hold.
Writing project
One piece of your own writing, with its plan, sections, sources and drafts.
A project is the Writing workspace's equivalent of a work in Review. It has its own category, type, purpose and depth, and its own adaptive planning path.
Writing session
A dated stretch of work on a project, with the words written and where you got to.
Sessions are what the writing analytics are built from. They are recorded by you, never inferred, so the figures stay honest.
Status
Where a work stands in your reading: To read, Queued, Reading, Paused, Completed, Abandoned, or Reference.
Status drives the reading queue and the dashboard, so keeping it current is what makes those surfaces accurate. Abandoned is a legitimate outcome, not a failure to record.
Page state
Where a notebook page stands: Incomplete, In progress, Complete, Skipped, or Not applicable.
Skipped and Not applicable are both honest answers. Neither counts against your progress.
Perspective lens
A structured place to record whose view a work presents, whose view is missing, and how your own view sits alongside it.
Fact and interpretation
A fact can be checked against a source outside the work. An interpretation is a reading you are offering, which can be argued with.
Keeping the two apart is the single most useful habit in this notebook, and it matters most in memoir, opinion writing and scholarly claims.
Recollection
Something remembered by the writer. In memoir it is evidence of experience, not of independently verifiable fact.
Close reading
Working carefully through a short passage — its words, images, rhythm and structure — rather than summarising the whole work.
Speaker
The voice saying a poem. The speaker is not automatically the poet, and treating them as separate usually opens the poem up.
Narrator reliability
How far the narrating voice can be trusted about the events it reports, and how the text signals any gap.
Thesis
The central claim a nonfiction work is arguing for, stated in a way that could in principle be disagreed with.
Warrant
The unstated assumption that connects a piece of evidence to the claim it is supposed to support.
Construct
The abstract thing a study intends to study, such as wellbeing or reading comprehension.
Operationalisation
How a study turns a construct into something it can actually measure or count.
Sample
Who or what was actually studied, how many, and how they were selected — which sets the limits of what the findings can cover.
Validity
Whether a measure or design really captures what it claims to capture.
Reliability
Whether a measure gives consistent results when repeated.
Theoretical or conceptual paper
Scholarly work that develops or reorganises ideas rather than reporting new data. Sample, measures and analysis pages do not apply to it.
Citation
A record of where something came from, complete enough that you or a reader can find it again.
Quotation
Someone else's exact words, kept exact and attributed, with the location recorded so you can return to it.
Annotation
A marked passage with your note attached, tied to a location in a specific work.
Reading log
Dated entries recording sessions with a work: where you got to, how long, and what stood out.
Collection
A grouping of works you make for your own reasons — a course, a theme, a reading order.
Comparison
A side-by-side view of two or more works along dimensions you choose.
Concept
A recurring idea or term you are tracking across works, with your own working definition.
Premise
The one- or two-sentence engine of a piece of writing: who wants what, against what resistance.
Logline
A single sentence naming the situation, the central want, and the obstacle.
Section
One unit of your manuscript — a chapter, scene, essay part or paper section — with its own draft text and word count.
Front and back matter
Everything around the main text: title page, dedication, acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, index.
Revision pass
One trip through the manuscript with a single job, such as structure, or clarity, or line edit.
Snapshot
A stored copy of a section's text at a moment in time, so you can compare or return to it.
Submission
A record of sending work somewhere: where, when, what you sent, and what came back.
Series
Related projects grouped in reading or publication order.
Custom field
A field you define yourself when the built-in pages do not have a place for it.
Note conversion
Bringing a note, quote or highlight from the Review workspace into a writing project, with its source kept attached.
Archive
A reversible way to put something out of sight. Archived items keep all their content and can be restored.
Permanent delete
Irreversible removal of an item and its attached records and files. Export first if you want a copy.
Export
A downloadable copy of your content — a single work or project, or a complete account archive.
Literary Match
The score used to rank Fiction results in Universal Search, describing fit with the theme, mood, style or setting you asked for.
It never measures quality, prestige or endorsement. A dimension without enough metadata is left unscored and marked "Not enough metadata to score" rather than guessed.
Purpose Match
The score used to rank Nonfiction results in Universal Search, describing fit with the subject, purpose or depth you asked for.
It never measures truth, credibility or agreement with a source's claims. A dimension without enough metadata is left unscored and marked "Not enough metadata to score" rather than guessed.
Access status
A plain label on a Universal Search result — Read Now, Preview, Borrow, Institutional Access, Purchase, Request, Record Only or User-Owned.
An access status describes what the source itself reports. It is never a promise that the full work is available, and Universal Search never implies lawful access on your behalf.
Provenance
Where a Universal Search result came from: which catalogue, its own record identifier, when it was retrieved, and the attribution the source requires.
Provenance is shown so you can judge a source for yourself. It is a source signal, not a quality or trust score.

Reach us

Email us and we will reply as soon as we can. Include the page you were on and what you expected to happen.

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