Terms of Service

By accessing or using The Arkive of Noah in any way — browsing the catalog, creating an account, buying or selling a book, posting a comment, following an author, or subscribing to our Sunday newsletter, The Dispatch — you agree to be bound by these Terms and by any policies we reference within them. If you are using the platform on behalf of an organization, you confirm that you have the authority to bind that organization to these Terms.

Some parts of the platform have additional requirements. For example, selling books requires approval as an author, and certain actions require a verified account. Those additional rules are part of these Terms. If a specific feature is governed by supplemental terms, those supplemental terms apply alongside this document, and where they conflict, the more specific terms control for that feature.

To create an account you must be able to form a legally binding contract under the law that applies to you, and you must provide accurate, current, and complete information — including your first and last name and a valid email address, and, if you choose, an optional username and (for authors) an avatar and bio. You agree to keep this information up to date. Accounts are for individuals: one person per account, and you may not share, sell, or transfer your account to anyone else.

You are responsible for safeguarding your login credentials and for all activity that occurs under your account, whether or not you authorized it. We use Supabase for email-and-password authentication and never see or store your password in readable form, but you must still choose a strong password and keep it confidential. Notify us promptly at thedove@thearkiveofnoah.com if you believe your account has been accessed without your permission.

Accounts carry roles — viewer, editor, or admin — and authorship is a separate, approved capability layered on top of an account. You may not attempt to grant yourself elevated roles, impersonate staff, editors, or other users, or otherwise misrepresent your relationship with the platform.

You agree to use The Arkive of Noah lawfully and respectfully. You may not post, upload, or distribute content that is illegal, infringing, defamatory, harassing, hateful, sexually exploitative, or otherwise harmful, and you may not use the platform to threaten, abuse, stalk, or harass any person, including authors, commenters, and staff.

You may not infringe anyone's intellectual property or other rights — for example by submitting catalog entries, comments, author content, or books that you do not have the right to share. You may not misrepresent the origin, identity, or rights status of anything you post.

You may not abuse the platform's infrastructure. This includes scraping, crawling, harvesting, or bulk-downloading our catalog, images, or book files except through features we expressly provide; circumventing rate limits, access controls, or the in-app reader; redistributing media obtained from the platform; or using bots or automated means to create accounts, post content, or place orders.

Because our books are DRM-protected and read-only, you specifically may not copy, capture, or reproduce the contents of the in-app reader or any book by any means. This includes taking screenshots, screen recordings, or screen captures of book pages, photographing your screen, using screen-sharing or screen-capture software, or employing any extension, script, tool, or device designed to extract, save, duplicate, or otherwise reproduce protected content. Books are provided for personal, on-screen reading only.

You may not probe, scan, or test the security of the platform, attempt to breach or bypass authentication, role checks, payment flows, or download entitlements, interfere with or overload our servers, or introduce malware. Attempting to obtain books, payouts, or refunds you are not entitled to — or to access another user's order, library, or account — is strictly prohibited.

The platform invites contributions: comments, likes, author follows, author profiles (including avatar and bio), and catalog submissions about plants, animals, fungi, algae, and elements, including Amharic and other names. You retain ownership of the content you create and submit. By posting it, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, reproduce, adapt for formatting, display, and distribute that content as needed to operate, promote, and improve the platform — for example, showing your comment on an item page, your profile on your author page, or an approved submission within the catalog.

You are solely responsible for the content you submit and you represent that you have all rights necessary to grant the license above and that your content does not violate these Terms or any law or third-party right. Do not submit confidential information you are not free to share.

Catalog submissions are subject to editorial review. Our editors and admins may accept, edit, reformat, reclassify, or reject submissions, and may remove or hide any user content at any time, with or without notice, including content we believe is inaccurate, infringing, abusive, or otherwise inconsistent with these Terms. We are not obligated to monitor user content, but we may do so, and the decision to publish or remove anything rests with us.

When you purchase a book through the marketplace, you are buying a personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive license to read that digital work in our in-app reader for your own personal, non-commercial use. The work is licensed to you, not sold to you outright, and you receive no ownership of it. You may not redistribute, resell, sublicense, lend, publicly share, upload elsewhere, or commercially exploit any book or its files.

Our books are DRM-protected and read-only. They are streamed to you inside the in-app reader and are never delivered to you as a downloadable file. You may not copy, reproduce, extract, export, print, or save the contents of any book; you may not take screenshots, screen recordings, screen captures, or photographs of any book page; and you may not use any browser extension, script, software, device, or other technical means to capture, duplicate, or reproduce a book's pages. You may not attempt to circumvent, disable, defeat, or work around the reader's copy-protection measures. These restrictions are conditions of your license: breaching them terminates your license to the affected work and may result in suspension of your account, without limiting any other remedy available to us or to the author.

Your purchases create download entitlements tied to your account, and you can read titles you own in our in-app PDF reader. We will make reasonable efforts to keep purchased titles available in your library, but we do not guarantee perpetual availability, as titles may be withdrawn by authors or removed for legal or policy reasons.

Because books are digital goods delivered immediately, all sales are generally final and non-refundable once access is granted. As a good-faith exception, if a file is faulty, corrupted, materially not as described, or was not delivered to you, contact us at thedove@thearkiveofnoah.com and we will work in good faith to fix the delivery or issue a refund. This good-faith approach does not create an unconditional right to refunds for change of mind or buyer's remorse.

Selling on the marketplace requires applying for and being approved as an author; we may approve, decline, suspend, or revoke author status at our discretion. As an author you must own or hold all rights necessary to sell each book you list, and you warrant that your books and author content do not infringe any copyright, trademark, privacy, or other right and do not contain illegal, plagiarized, harmful, or prohibited material. You set the listing, but we may review, unpublish, or remove any title or author profile that violates these Terms or applicable law.

Our payout model is straightforward: The platform pays you directly. You earn 70% of each sale minus payment processing — a platform commission of 30%. This 30% is the current commission rate; we may adjust it with reasonable notice, the rate in effect when a sale completes is the one that applies to that sale, and the rate is always shown to you in your Studio when you set a book's price. We settle your balance off-platform (bank transfer, Telebirr, etc.) and record each payout in your Studio dashboard. Your net per sale is snapshotted at the time of purchase, so later changes to the commission do not retroactively alter completed sales, and your running balance and payout history are visible in your Studio dashboard.

In our default manual payout mode, the platform collects all sales and settles your balance to you off-platform on a periodic basis, recording each disbursement in your dashboard. Where Stripe Connect payouts are enabled instead, your share may be transferred to you automatically through Stripe under its terms. In both cases the economics — currently 70% to you, a 30% commission, plus modeled payment-processing costs — remain the same.

You are solely responsible for your own taxes, levies, and any reporting or withholding obligations arising from your sales, in every jurisdiction that applies to you. We do not provide tax advice and the amounts we pay or report do not constitute tax advice. You are responsible for the accuracy of the payout details you provide to us.

Payments are processed by our third-party payment providers: Stripe and Chapa (the Ethiopian gateway, supporting telebirr, CBE Birr, and cards). Depending on your provider and region, your purchase may be charged in US dollars (USD) or Ethiopian birr (ETB), and amounts shown in one currency may be converted to the other at checkout using a current conversion rate. The displayed total at checkout is the authoritative amount for that transaction.

Your payment-card and payment-account details are collected and handled by Stripe or Chapa, not by us. We do not see or store full card numbers; we store only order metadata and a payment reference needed to fulfill your purchase, confirm payment, grant your download, and support refunds. Your use of these providers is also subject to their respective terms and privacy policies.

Prices are determined and re-verified by the platform at checkout from the published listing, not from your cart, so the amount you are charged reflects the current published price. We may correct pricing errors and decline or cancel orders we believe are fraudulent, unauthorized, or in violation of these Terms.

The Arkive of Noah — including the curated archive and its organization, the catalog text and imagery we produce or license, the software, design, page layouts, user interface, the in-app reader, and the names, logos, and branding of The Arkive of Noah and The Dispatch — is owned by us or our licensors and is protected by intellectual property and other laws. Catalog images may originate from sources such as GBIF under their own open licenses, and where attribution is provided you must respect those underlying license terms.

Except for the limited rights expressly granted to you in these Terms — such as browsing the catalog and reading books you have licensed — you receive no ownership of, and no license to reuse, copy, modify, distribute, or create derivative works from, the platform, its software, or its branding. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

The platform and all content are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the platform will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that defects will be corrected.

Our catalog is an educational resource about the natural world, including plants, animals, fungi, algae, and elements, with information about edibility, toxicity, conservation status, and safety. This information may be incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate and is not professional advice. Do not rely on it for medical, dietary, foraging, safety, environmental, legal, or any other professional decision — never eat, handle, or use any organism or substance based solely on our catalog. Always consult a qualified professional. Likewise, books, blog posts, comments, and author content reflect the views of their creators, not us, and we do not endorse or guarantee them.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, The Arkive of Noah and its operators, contributors, and licensors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or other intangible losses, arising out of or related to your use of (or inability to use) the platform, the marketplace, any book or content, or these Terms, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the platform will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid to us in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim, or USD 50. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so portions of this section may not apply to you; in that case our liability is limited to the smallest extent permitted by law.

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless The Arkive of Noah and its operators, contributors, and licensors from and against any claims, demands, losses, liabilities, damages, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to your use of the platform, your content or submissions, the books or other materials you sell as an author, your violation of these Terms or any law, or your infringement of any third-party right.

We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, in which case you agree to cooperate with our defense of that claim.

You may stop using the platform and close your account at any time by contacting us. We may suspend, restrict, or terminate your account, author status, or access to any feature — and may remove content, unpublish listings, or withhold a payout pending investigation — at our discretion, with or without notice, if we believe you have violated these Terms, created risk or legal exposure, engaged in fraud or abuse, or harmed the platform or its users.

On termination, your right to use the platform ends immediately. Where you are an author, we will make reasonable efforts to settle any legitimately earned, undisputed balance owed to you under the payout model, subject to investigation of any suspected violations. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — including content licenses already granted, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law — will continue to apply after your account ends.

We may update these Terms from time to time as the platform evolves — for example, to reflect new features, marketplace changes, payment providers, or legal requirements. When we make material changes, we will take reasonable steps to notify you, such as updating the effective date, posting a notice on the site, or emailing you.

Your continued use of the platform after changes take effect constitutes your acceptance of the revised Terms. If you do not agree to the updated Terms, you should stop using the platform and may close your account.

These Terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to them or the platform are governed by, and will be interpreted in accordance with, the applicable laws of the jurisdiction in which the platform operates, without regard to conflict-of-law principles, and you agree to the jurisdiction of the courts competent there to the extent permitted by law. Nothing in these Terms removes any mandatory legal protections that apply to you and cannot be waived under the law of your own place of residence.

If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force, and our failure to enforce any right is not a waiver of that right. These Terms are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the platform.

Questions, notices, refund requests, security reports, or payout inquiries can be sent to us at thedove@thearkiveofnoah.com, and you can find us at thearkiveofnoah.com. We read what you send and aim to respond in good faith.