Terms of Sale
Last updated: September 8, 2026
These terms apply when you buy a PDF edition directly from Sticking Place Books through this website. They do not apply to books you buy from Amazon, Bookshop.org, IngramSpark, or any other retailer — those sales are governed by that retailer’s own terms.
Who you are buying from
Sticking Place Books is the seller and the publisher of record. Payments are processed by Stripe, Inc.; we never see or store your card details. Your card statement will show a charge from Sticking Place Books.
Where we can sell
Direct PDF sales are currently offered to customers in the United States. We are not yet set up to handle sales tax and VAT registration elsewhere, so please buy through one of our retail partners if you are outside the US — every book page lists them.
What you get
- A complete PDF of the book, with no DRM and no copy protection. You can read it on any device, print it, and keep it indefinitely.
- A download link, sent by email and shown on screen immediately after payment. The link does not expire.
- Up to ten downloads per order. That is meant to cover your phone, your laptop, a tablet and a reinstall. If you reach the limit, reply to your confirmation email and we will reset it — you own the book, and we are happy to do it.
Your name in the file
Each copy we sell carries a small bookplate leaf at the very end, after the book has finished. It shows the name given at checkout, the title, the date, your order number and a short copy reference. The pages of the book itself are untouched — there is no watermark across the text, nothing in the margins, and the page count is unchanged.
We do this instead of DRM. It lets us sell you a file that actually works everywhere, while still being able to tell where a copy came from if one is posted publicly. We do not print your email address in the file. If you would like a different name on the bookplate — a gift, an institution, a pen name — email us and we will reissue it.
Please do not upload the file or pass it on. Small presses live or die on direct sales, and this one funds the next book.
Immediate delivery and your right to cancel
Because the book is delivered digitally and immediately, by completing your purchase you ask us to begin delivery right away and you acknowledge that once the file has been downloaded you lose any statutory right to cancel that would otherwise apply to distance sales of digital content.
Refunds
- If you have not downloaded the file, we will refund you in full, for any reason, within 30 days of purchase. Just ask.
- If the file is faulty — corrupt, incomplete, the wrong book, or unreadable on a mainstream PDF reader — we will fix it or refund you in full, whether or not you have downloaded it. Tell us what went wrong and we will make it right.
- Otherwise, we do not refund a downloaded file, because we cannot take it back.
Refunds go back to the card you paid with, usually within five to ten business days. When we refund an order, the download link stops working.
What you may do with it
Your purchase is a licence for personal, non-commercial reading, not a transfer of copyright. You may read it, print it for your own use, and keep backups. You may not redistribute it, upload it to a file-sharing service or repository, resell it, or use it to train a machine-learning model. Teaching and scholarly use beyond fair use is welcome — please ask us and we will almost certainly say yes.
If something goes wrong
If your payment succeeded but no book arrived, nothing is lost. Our system retries automatically and alerts us when it cannot. Give it ten minutes, then contact us with your order number and we will deliver it by hand.
Your information
To sell you a book we keep your name, email address, billing country, order number and download history, and we record which copy was issued to you. Our Privacy Policy explains what we do with all of it and how long we keep it.
Changes and contact
We may update these terms; the version in force is the one published when you buy. Ask us anything at our contact page.