Terms of Service

Draft pending counsel review. Entity (Compendium LLC), governing law (New Mexico), and venue (Bernalillo County) are all set — no [FILL]s remain. See LAUNCH_PLAN.md §7.

1. About these Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of Compendium (the "Service"), a streaming audiobook product for public-domain texts operated by Compendium LLC, a New Mexico limited liability company ("Compendium," "we," "us"). By creating an account, starting a free trial, or using any part of the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, don't use the Service.

2. Who can use Compendium

You must be at least 13 years old to create a free account (16 in the EU/UK). To start a trial, subscribe, or provide a payment method you must be at least 18 and have the legal capacity to enter a binding agreement; if you are under 18, a parent or legal guardian must hold the paid account and accept these Terms on your behalf. By subscribing you represent that you meet these requirements. The Service is offered globally except where prohibited by US trade sanctions or other applicable law, and we may decline or withdraw access in any jurisdiction at our discretion.

3. Your account

You're responsible for keeping your password confidential and for everything that happens on your account. Tell us right away at support@compendium.audio if you suspect unauthorized access. One subscription is for one person; sharing within a household is fine, but commercial redistribution is not (see §6).

4. What the Service is

Compendium streams neural-TTS narrations of public-domain books, sourced from public-domain text repositories such as Project Gutenberg. We use the original public-domain text of each work and do not include, or claim any right in, copyright-protected additions to a particular edition (such as a modern translation, introduction, or annotations), and we remove third-party branding and trademarks from the source files. The narrations, cover art, software, and curated catalog are our own intellectual property (see §7). Chapter 1 of every book is publicly listenable without an account; chapter 2 and beyond require an active subscription. We may add, remove, or re-narrate books at our discretion.

We select titles in good faith as being in the public domain under United States copyright law. Copyright terms differ by country, so a title that is public domain in the US may still be protected elsewhere. We make no representation that any title is public domain, or that streaming it is lawful, in your country, and you are responsible for your own compliance with local law. We may restrict or geo-block titles or the Service in any territory. If you believe a work is not in the public domain, see our rights-complaint process in §14.

5. Subscription, billing, trial, refunds

• Price: $5.00 USD per month, billed monthly by Stripe.
• 7-day free trial: When you subscribe for the first time we collect a payment method but do not charge it during the trial. Cancel during the trial and you will not be charged. One trial per person; if you cancel and resubscribe, the second subscription is paid immediately (no second trial).
• Auto-renewal: The subscription renews automatically each month until you cancel. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period — you keep access until then, and we don't prorate refunds for unused days.
• How to cancel: One click from your account page, which opens the Stripe Customer Portal. No phone call, no "are you sure" loop.
• 14-day refund window: If you're a first-time subscriber and you cancel within 14 days of the first paid charge, email support@compendium.audio and we'll refund that charge in full. Refunds go to your original payment method via Stripe.
• Failed payments: If Stripe can't collect, your account enters a 3-day grace period. After that, chapter 2+ access pauses until you update your card from the Customer Portal.
• Price changes: If we change the price, we'll email active subscribers at least 30 days before the change applies to them. You can cancel before the new price takes effect.

6. Acceptable use

You agree NOT to:

• Automate or scrape the Service, or download audio files in bulk for rehosting. (The underlying public-domain texts you can absolutely download — go to Project Gutenberg directly.)
• Rebroadcast, podcast, or publicly perform our narrations — including on YouTube, podcast platforms, or social video — without our written permission.
• Use the Service for any unlawful purpose, to harass anyone, or to circumvent our access controls (paywalls, rate limits, authentication).
• Share your account credentials publicly or resell access.

We may suspend accounts that repeatedly trigger our fraud or abuse signals (Stripe Radar holds, payment disputes, automated traffic, etc.) and we may terminate persistently bad-faith accounts. If we terminate you for cause, you're not entitled to a refund of the current paid period.

Your indemnity. To the maximum extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Compendium LLC and its members, officers, and contractors from any third-party claim, demand, loss, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your misuse of the Service, your breach of these Terms, your violation of any law, or your rebroadcast, redistribution, or other unauthorized use of our narrations.

7. Intellectual property

• The book texts on Compendium are public domain and not owned by us.
• The narrations, cover art, code, designs, and the Compendium name and logo are owned by us (or licensed to us). Your subscription gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to stream our narrations for your own listening. No commercial, broadcast, or derivative rights are granted.
• Feedback you send us is non-confidential; we can use it without owing you anything in return.

8. Modification and termination

We may modify or discontinue any part of the Service at any time. If we permanently shut Compendium down while you have a paid subscription, we'll refund the unused portion of your current billing period. You can terminate your account at any time — see §5 to cancel a subscription, or use the "Cancel subscription" affordance on your account page to delete the account entirely (which cascades your data per our Privacy Policy).

9. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." We don't promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that every narration will be free of mispronunciations or other TTS artifacts. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties — express, implied, or statutory — including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. Nothing in this section limits any warranty that can't be excluded under applicable consumer law.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Compendium's total aggregate liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service is limited to the total amount you paid us in the twelve months immediately before the claim. We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages — including lost profits, lost data, or lost goodwill — even if we've been advised of the possibility. Some jurisdictions don't allow these limits; in those places the limits apply to the maximum extent the law allows.

11. Governing law, disputes, and class-action waiver

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Mexico, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising under these Terms will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, and you and we consent to personal jurisdiction there. Either of us may bring a qualifying claim in small-claims court instead.

Individual claims only. To the maximum extent permitted by law, you and we agree that any dispute will be brought only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, consolidated, or representative proceeding. You and we each waive any right to a jury trial. If a court finds this class-action waiver unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) is severed and may proceed in court.

Any claim must be brought within one year after it arises, or it is permanently barred, except where applicable law prohibits shortening the limitations period.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms; the latest version is always at /terms.html. We'll email active subscribers about material changes at least 30 days before they take effect. Continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the updated Terms.

13. Miscellaneous

If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision isn't a waiver of it. These Terms (with our Privacy Policy) are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service. You can't assign these Terms to anyone else; we can assign them as part of a sale or reorganization.

Events beyond our control. We are not liable for any failure or delay in providing the Service caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including outages or failures of third-party infrastructure and providers (such as our hosting, database, payment, email, or content-delivery vendors), network failures, acts of God, or government action.

14. Copyright and rights complaints

We respect intellectual-property rights and respond to good-faith claims. If you believe a title on Compendium is not in the public domain, or that our narration or cover art infringes a right you hold, email support@compendium.audio with: (1) the title and URL; (2) a description of the right you claim and the basis for it; (3) your contact information; (4) a statement, made in good faith, that the use is not authorized by the rights holder, its agent, or the law; and (5) a statement that the information is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the rights holder or authorized to act for them.

We will review valid notices promptly and may remove or disable access to the contested title while we do. Compendium publishes only content we curate and produce ourselves and does not host user-uploaded material, so we handle these notices directly through the contact above. We may retain and share notices as needed to respond to and document complaints.

15. Contact

All inquiries — billing, rights/legal notices, privacy/data requests, and everything else: support@compendium.audio

Last updated: 2026-06-27. Back to library.