Privacy Policy

Who operates this service

Literature Notebook is operated by Perspectives Plus Research LLC. You can reach us through the help page or at share@perspectivesplus.org.

What we store

• Account data. Your email address, an authentication record, your display name, and your notebook preferences.
• Content you create. Works you record, creators, concepts, collections, notebook and planning pages, highlights, notes, reading logs, comparisons, writing projects, sections, sources, characters, revision items, sessions and goals.
• Files you upload. Attachments you add to a work, stored in a private bucket reachable only through your authenticated account. Before a file is accepted it is checked against the size limit for your plan, an allow-listed type list, a match between its extension and its declared type, and its actual leading bytes; stored files are also screened structurally, and anything that fails is quarantined rather than served. These are technical safety checks. They do not establish who owns a file or whether you have permission to store or share it — that responsibility stays with you. See the Acceptable Use Policy and the Copyright & Quotation Policy.
• Consent records. The date, policy version and place where you accepted the Terms and acknowledged this policy.
• Billing and subscription records. Your plan, its status, trial dates, renewal or cancellation state, and the identifiers our payment processor gives us. Stripe processes payments and subscription management; Literature Notebook does not store full payment-card details. We keep these records for as long as we need them to provide your plan and to meet tax and accounting duties.
• Diagnostics. Application error reports used to fix crashes. We do not operate advertising or cross-site tracking.

Why we store it

To run your account, keep your notebook available across devices, enforce plan limits honestly, keep the service secure, and fix defects. We do not sell personal data, and we do not use your notebook content to train machine-learning models.

Who can read your notebook

Your notebook is private by default: nothing you record is published by us or shown to another account unless you deliberately share it. Access rules are enforced in the database itself, per row, against your authenticated account — not only in the interface. Our staff do not browse account content as a matter of routine; access happens only where it is necessary to investigate a fault or a security incident, or where the law requires it.

There are two ways you can choose to let someone else see your material, and both take a deliberate action by you:

• Collaboration on a writing project. You can invite people to a specific writing project on Literature Notebook. What each invited person can see and do is controlled by the role you give them, and it is limited to the project you invited them to — it never extends to your library, your other projects or your account. You can change a role or remove access, and an unaccepted invitation expires by itself.
• Perspectives+ Connections. You can send an independent copy of selected material to another Perspectives+ destination you choose. The copy arrives in that destination's inbox for review and has to be assigned there deliberately; nothing is placed silently. A current work or source copy carries the work details and metadata only — not your notebook pages, highlights, notes or files — unless a specific supported transfer explicitly lists something else, and the preview tells you what is included and what is excluded before you send.

Connections is a copy, not a live link. Once a copy has been received, each side controls its own copy: later edits on either side do not sync, and deleting one does not delete the other. Where a copy came from is recorded with it, so its origin stays attributable.

Service providers

We use a managed database, authentication and file-storage provider to host the service, and a hosting provider to serve the application. If you sign in with Google, Google receives the fact that you authenticated with us. Stripe processes payments and subscription management for paid plans; card details are entered on Stripe’s own checkout and are never stored by us. These providers process data on our instructions, and Stripe additionally keeps payment records under its own obligations and retention rules, which we cannot shorten.

How long we keep it

• Notebook content and uploads are kept while your account exists.
• Archived items are kept until you delete them — archiving is not deletion.
• Deleting an item removes it from your account immediately and it is removed from routine operational backups on their normal rotation.
• When you delete your account, we aim to erase your content and uploads within 3 days. Billing records held by our payment processor are kept under its own retention rules.
• Consent records are retained after deletion only as long as needed to show compliance.

Your controls

• Export. Download a complete archive of your account — every record, plus readable Markdown — from Settings.
• Correct. Edit any record directly, or your name in Settings.
• Delete. Delete individual items, or your whole account with a typed confirmation.
• Ask. Contact us through the help page for anything the app does not cover.

Universal Search (Studio)

Universal Search is a Studio-only way to discover records from connected public catalogues: Open Library, Google Books, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, Crossref and DOAJ (Nonfiction only), and Europeana when a server credential is configured on this deployment — otherwise Europeana is shown as not configured and is never called.

Only the text and filters of a search you actively trigger are sent to the named catalogue provider you searched. Your account identity, reading notes, drafts, annotations and attachments are never sent to a catalogue provider. No provider is called automatically when a page loads, and Universal Search never performs a general web search.

Saving a search alert is in-app only. Email delivery for saved-search alerts is not configured, so alerts do not arrive by email.

Children

Literature Notebook is not intended for children under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has an account, contact us and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes materially we update the version above and ask you to acknowledge it the next time you sign in.