Terms of Service — Northoward

Acceptance

By using the Northoward website (northoward.com) or by buying, downloading, or reading anything we publish, you agree to the terms on this page. If you do not agree with a term, the remedy is straightforward: do not use the site and do not buy the book. If you have already bought something, our refund policy covers you.

“Northoward,” “we,” and “us” refer to Northoward, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company. “You” means the person reading this page and, where relevant, the person who bought the book.

Your license to a book

When you buy a Northoward title, we grant you a single-user, non-transferable, non-exclusive license to read it. In practical terms, this means:

The book is for you. Read it on the devices you use.
Keep a personal backup. That is expected and encouraged.
Quote from it in the ordinary ways adults quote from books — a paragraph in a review, a passage in a class discussion, a line in a talk — with credit to the title and to Northoward.

The license is yours for as long as the file is yours. There is no expiration and no phone-home check. It is a PDF or an EPUB, kept on your machine.

Permitted use

You may read our titles for personal use, and for the ordinary professional uses a working adult puts a book to — reference at your desk, notes in your own commonplace book, a few paragraphs shared with a colleague who might want a copy of their own.

If you would like to use a Northoward title in a classroom, a workshop, a book club with a reading fee, or any other setting where more than a handful of readers will encounter it, write to press@northoward.com. We are a small press, and we say yes to most reasonable requests.

What you cannot do

The list is short and, we hope, unsurprising.

Do not resell the file or any part of it.
Do not upload it to a public site, a file locker, a torrent tracker, or any other place that distributes it to strangers.
Do not remove the title page, the colophon, or the credit that identifies the book as ours.
Do not rewrap the book — in whole or in substantial part — as your own work, your own course, or your own newsletter.
Do not use our text as training data for a machine-learning model without written permission from us.

None of this is meant to be aggressive. It is the small architecture that keeps a small press working.

Payment and pricing

Prices are listed in United States dollars. Our current catalog runs from $15 for Reading, Slowly to $42 for The Long Middle, with most titles between $18 and $34. Prices can change; the price on the checkout page at the moment you buy is the price you pay.

Payments are processed by our payment providers. We do not see or store your card number. If your card is declined, or if a payment is reversed by your bank, we may pause access to the file while we sort it out with you by email.

Delivery

Delivery is immediate and digital. When your payment clears, a download link appears on the order confirmation page and a copy of the same link is sent to the email address you gave at checkout. Links stay valid for thirty days, which is more than long enough to save the file somewhere you will find it again.

If a download does not arrive, or arrives broken, write to hello@northoward.com with your order number and we will send it again. We answer within one working day, most days sooner.

Refunds

Our refund policy lives on its own page, so it can be updated without disturbing this one. The short version is that we will refund a title, without a fuss, if it is not what you expected. Read the full terms on the refund policy page.

Intellectual property

The titles we publish, the essays and blog posts on this site, the site design, the wordmark, and the name Northoward are the intellectual property of Northoward, LLC or of the authors we work with, and are protected under United States copyright and trademark law. Your license to read a book does not transfer any of these rights to you.

If you believe something on this site infringes your work, write to hello@northoward.com with the details and we will look at it in good faith.

Third-party services

We use a handful of well-known services to keep the store running — a payment processor, an email provider, a hosting company. Their own terms apply when you interact with them. We keep the list short on purpose. What we collect and why is written up on the privacy page.

Disclaimer of warranties

Our books are essays and field guides. They are the honest thinking of the editors and authors we work with, and they are meant to be useful. They are not medical, legal, financial, tax, or therapeutic advice, and reading them does not create a professional relationship of any kind. If you are facing a decision that calls for a professional, please see one.

The site and the books are provided “as is,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, to the fullest extent allowed by law. We do our best; we cannot promise the site will always be available, or that every file will open on every device you own.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Northoward, LLC and its members, editors, and contributors are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising out of your use of the site or the books. If, in spite of that, a court finds us liable for a specific claim, our total liability for that claim is limited to the amount you paid us for the title in question in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred United States dollars, whichever is greater.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, and where that is the case the limitations above apply to you only to the extent the law permits.

Your side of the bargain

You agree not to use the site or the books in a way that breaks the law, that infringes another person’s rights, or that damages our reasonable interests. If your use of the site causes a claim against us by a third party, you agree to cover our reasonable costs in dealing with it.

Ending the arrangement

You can stop using the site at any time and, if you like, delete any files you bought from us. We can suspend or end your access to the site — and, in serious cases, revoke a license — if you breach these terms in a way that harms other readers, our authors, or the press itself. We will write to you first if there is time.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts sitting in Delaware are the exclusive forum for any dispute that these terms do not settle by themselves, and you and Northoward each consent to their jurisdiction.

Before either side files anything, we ask that you write to us and give us thirty days to work it out by email. Most disagreements resolve there.

Changes to these terms

We revise this page from time to time, usually when a small thing on the store changes and the wording here needs to catch up. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version. If we make a change that affects a right you actually rely on, we will note it plainly at the top of the page for a while.

Miscellaneous

These terms, together with the privacy policy and the refund policy, are the whole agreement between you and Northoward about the site and the books. If a court finds any part unenforceable, the rest still stands. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion is not a waiver of the term on another. You may not assign your rights under these terms; we may assign ours to a successor of the business.

Contact

Questions about these terms, or about anything the terms do not cover, go to hello@northoward.com. Press and permissions inquiries go to press@northoward.com.

Eleanor Whitfield
Founding editor, Northoward