Your account and privacy

Basic book information (title, author, ISBN) can be shared in AllMyBooks’ public catalog to help other users’ scans and searches find the right book. Your personal data — which books you own, your notes, your custom covers, and your library membership — stays private to your Library. Removing a book from your library only ends your library’s relationship with it: the shared catalogue record stays, with its details and any photos approved for public display. A photo you uploaded that an admin approved for the catalogue stays public even if you remove it from your photos or delete your account — if a public photo must come down, ask us through the Contact page. See the full Privacy Policy for details.

Shelf photographs are stricter than any of that, because a picture of a bookcase is a picture of a room in your home. Shelf scanning reads the spines on the phone and deletes the photograph, and that stays true unless your library’s owner turns keeping on. Where it is on, a kept photograph is readable only by your library’s owners and by whoever took it — not by other members, not by guests, and not by anyone holding a link, because there is no link to hold. It is never included in an export, a backup, a showcase, a share link, the public catalogue or an estate report. Find them under Library setup → Shelf photographs, where any of them can be deleted; whoever took a photograph can delete it whatever their role.

Library activity — who moved, re-graded or removed which copy, and from what to what — is visible only to that library’s Admins and Members, never to Guests, other libraries or the public, and each entry is deleted after 90 days. It records the copy, the location or condition, and who made the change; nothing else about you. When an account is deleted, its entries stay for the rest of the library but read "a former member"; when a library is deleted, its activity and any removed copies waiting to be restored go with it at once. Shelf checks work the same way: only the library’s Admins and Members can open them, a deleted account’s checks, marks and "missing" marks stay for the rest of the library without its name, and deleting the library deletes its checks. A finished or discarded check — its list, what was seen and its review — is kept for 12 months after it closed and then deleted; a check still in progress is never deleted. What outlives it is each copy’s latest "last seen in place" date and any missing mark, which stay with the copy.

On a shared computer, signing out of the website removes what your account left in that browser: the books and libraries it had loaded, any book you were part-way through adding, the last shelf you picked, your column and view choices, and that browser’s copy of your language and region (your account keeps it). The light or dark theme stays, since it says nothing about you. If someone else signs in on the same browser without you signing out first — after your session has run out, say — the website clears your data before showing them anything.

You can delete your account yourself in the phone app: Settings → "Delete account…". The website has no delete button — reach out through the Contact page and we’ll do it for you. Either way it permanently removes your personal information, your library memberships, and your saved views; a library nobody else belongs to is deleted with its books — including removed copies still waiting in Library activity, which are erased at once rather than after 30 days — the photos uploaded to its copies (photos approved for the shared catalogue stay in it) and any shelf photographs it kept (from storage, not just from the listing), while a library others still belong to stays with them — its books, shelves, photos and wish list included, with your name taken off what you added. A book you had borrowed stays on the lender’s records as lent to your display name (never your email address), so they still know where it is; a book club you own passes to its longest-standing member. If you are the only Admin of a library that has other members, make someone else an Admin first. Account deletion can’t be undone.

1. On the sign-in page, choose "Forgot password?" under the email field.
2. Enter the address you sign in with and choose "Email me a reset link".
3. Open the email from AllMyBooks and choose "Choose a new password", then enter the new password twice.
4. Sign in with the new password.

The link works once and expires within the hour; if it has, the page offers to send a new one. You can ask for up to three reset emails in ten minutes. The page answers the same way whether or not the address has an account, so it never reveals who uses AllMyBooks. An account created with Google has no password to reset — sign in with Continue with Google instead.

Your Profile page holds your avatar, display name, reading goal, and reading stats drawn from your library. A website, if you add one, can be typed as example.org or with http:// or https://; an address without either is saved with https:// in front.

First name and last name are optional. They are what emails from AllMyBooks greet you by; other members only ever see your display name. If you sign in with Google, we fill them in from your Google profile the first time, and only where they are still empty — anything you type here stays as you typed it. Leave them blank and emails fall back to your display name.

• Sharing a Library — roles →
• Value & Insurance →

The Email card on your Profile page has two switches, and each kind of email carries its own one-click link at the bottom, so you can turn either off without signing in.

Product announcements by email: now and then we email every account about something new, such as the phone app. An announcement may greet you by the first name on your Profile, or by your display name when no first name is stored. Every one of those emails carries an "Unsubscribe from announcements" link; opening it turns announcement emails off for your account straight away. The Profile switch is also where you turn them back on.

New accounts also receive a welcome email and one follow-up a week later that depends on how many books you have added by then; the follow-up respects the announcements switch, while the welcome is account mail and arrives regardless. If you signed up with a password, both are scheduled from the moment you confirm your email address, not from when the account was created — an account that never confirms is never sent them. Signing up with Google schedules them at once.

Replies to your messages by email: when someone answers a message you sent through the site, or the AllMyBooks team writes to you, we send a short email saying who wrote and linking to the conversation in your inbox — the message itself is not in the email. At most one such email per conversation every 30 minutes. Each carries a "Stop reply emails" link; opening it turns reply emails off for your account, and the Profile switch turns them back on. Replies still arrive in your inbox on the site either way. If you are signed out when you open the link, the site asks you to sign in first — with your password or with Google — and then opens that conversation, not your library.

The two switches are independent: turning announcements off does not stop reply emails, and turning reply emails off does not stop announcements. Library invitations and other email about your account still arrive.

Language and region sets the language AllMyBooks is shown in and how dates and numbers are written — the order of day and month, how thousands are grouped, the names of the months. Choose it on the Language and region card of your Profile page, or under Language and region on the phone’s Settings tab; on the website, the language menu at the right of the header switches the language too. It is saved on your account, so the same choice applies on every computer and phone you sign in on. Choose Automatic to let each device follow its own language settings again.

AllMyBooks is in English, French, Greek and Russian. English is offered for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, French for France, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, Greek for Greece and Cyprus, and Russian for Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Ukraine: every region of a language reads the same text, and differs only in how dates and numbers are written. With Automatic, a device set to a language AllMyBooks is not yet available in shows English, written the way that device’s region writes dates and numbers.

Only AllMyBooks itself is translated. Titles, authors, descriptions, notes and everything else you or your library entered stay exactly as they were typed. The Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are in English, with a short summary in French, in Greek and in Russian.

Topics are the one exception, and only where an official vocabulary already names them in your language. In French, topics such as Chemistry or Motion pictures show the names the Bibliothèque nationale de France gives them in its subject headings, RAMEAU, which it links to the Library of Congress headings: « Chimie », « Cinéma ». In Greek, they show the terms of EuroVoc, the European Union’s multilingual thesaurus, or of the Thesaurus of Greek Terms of the National Documentation Centre (EKT): « Χημεία », « Κινηματογράφος ». A few long headings are shown in a shorter form, marked as such on the credits page that every list of these names links to. A topic on a book’s page shows its name in your language only when the whole subject is that topic; any other subject stays as the catalogue gave it, and a topic with no heading in your language keeps its English name. You can search for a topic by its name in your language too.

Prices always keep the currency they were entered in — choosing a region never converts an amount or changes its currency. A Library’s currency and units are the Library’s own setting, shared by everyone in it. On the phone a choice made without a signal applies straight away and reaches your account when the phone is back online.

If you sign up with an email address and a password, we send you a confirmation email as soon as the account is created — one message, with one button, from AllMyBooks. Open it, press Confirm my email on the page it opens, and your library is ready — the page asks for that press so that mail scanners following links cannot confirm an address on your behalf. Until you do, the site shows a "Check your inbox" page instead of your catalogue: an unconfirmed account cannot add books, and we do not send it anything else.

The link works for 24 hours and can be used once. If it has expired or you never received it, the "Check your inbox" page has a Resend button — you can ask for up to three emails in ten minutes. Look in your spam folder first; it is the same sender as every other email we send you.

An account that is never confirmed is deleted seven days after it was created, which frees the address to sign up again. Nothing is lost that you would miss — an unconfirmed account cannot have added anything.

Signing in with Google skips all of this: Google has already confirmed the address, so you go straight to your library and no confirmation email is sent. Accounts that existed before we introduced this step are unaffected — you will never be asked to confirm an address you have been using.

• Email we send →