Deleting Your Account

Deleting Your Account

You can close your account at any time. It happens immediately and cannot be undone.

How to Delete Your Account

1. Go to Settings from the menu at the bottom of the sidebar.
2. Open the Profile tab.
3. Scroll to the bottom and click Delete account.
4. Enter your password to confirm. We ask for it every time — this is not a dialog you can click past.

You can also ask us to close your account by opening a ticket from Support in the sidebar.

What Happens to Your Personal Data

Either way, your personal information is erased from everywhere we use it to run the service — your questionnaire answers, the text of your books, your saved proofs, your profile photo, your support tickets and the contents of our email and diagnostic logs. Any review you wrote is taken down and deleted, together with its photo.

It is not erased from absolutely everywhere, and we would rather say so here than let you discover it afterwards. A small set of payment and dispute records survives in full, permanently. What Is Retained, further down, sets out exactly what and why.

What differs is whether the account record itself survives:

• If you have never bought anything — no order and no credit purchase — the account record is deleted outright.
• If you have ever placed an order or bought credits, the account record is kept but anonymized: your name becomes “Redacted User”, your email address is replaced with a placeholder that cannot receive mail, and your password, saved photo and sign-in settings are destroyed. We keep the record because a paid order has to stay attached to something for tax and accounting law. Nobody can sign in to it, and the account record itself holds nothing that identifies you.

Support tickets are handled the same way: rather than being deleted, the subject, your name and email, and every message body are overwritten with “Redacted”, and any files you attached are deleted. This keeps the conversation history from breaking while removing everything personal from it.

If a Book Is Still Being Printed

If you delete your account while an order is still at the printer, we hold back the erasure of your shipping address and that book’s contents until the parcel has shipped — otherwise the book you paid for could not be delivered. Everything else is erased right away, and the rest follows automatically once the order is on its way.

What Is Retained

Some records outlive the deletion. Two of them are stripped of anything that points at you; one of them is not, and that is the one worth reading carefully.

• Order records — amounts, dates and tax fields, because a paid transaction has to be accounted for. The personal detail attached to them is removed.
• Proof approval records — that a book was reviewed and approved before printing, and the exact wording you agreed to. Your IP address and browser details are stripped out of these; what stays is the fact of the approval, as legal protection for both sides.
• Payment transaction logs and dispute records — these are kept in full, indefinitely, and are not stripped. That includes the IP address a payment was made from and the full record of any chargeback. We keep them for fraud prevention, for cooperating with law enforcement, and to establish or defend a legal claim — a payment dispute can surface long after an account is gone, and closing the account cannot be allowed to erase the evidence. If an order of yours was ever disputed, the carrier’s delivery record for it stays too, because it is our proof that the parcel arrived.

Our Privacy Policy has a Data Retention section that sets out how long we keep account data, order and payment data, proof approval records, payment and dispute records, the logs behind your book’s generation, and your questionnaire answers. If any of this matters to your decision, read it before you delete.

If you want to know how long we keep something that section does not name, open a ticket from Support in the sidebar and ask before you delete your account, while you can still reach the support pages.

Before You Delete

• Download your Digital Edition and Audiobook files first, from the Downloads page. The files you have already saved stay yours forever, but re-downloading them from us ends with the account.
• Export your personal data if you want a copy of everything, including your purchased files. It is the Data Export tab of your settings, and Exporting Your Data walks through it.
• Any unused credits are forfeited and cannot be refunded.
• Printed books you have already received are yours and stay yours. You are never asked to return them.