To choose books for someone, we have to be told about them. So most of what is written down here is not about you — it is about the person you are buying for, who has never been to this site. That part is further down and it is the part worth reading.

The short version

• We store your conversation with Tilda, because it is the only way to tell a bad recommendation from a bad question.
• We keep it for six months, then delete it. You can ask us to delete it sooner.
• Your card details never reach us. Stripe handles them.
• No cookies, and nothing kept on your device between visits.
• We do not sell any of it, and we do not advertise to anyone with it.

What we hold

• Your name and email address, from the preview list or from your invite.
• Your reader's first name, and the day you choose to tell them.
• The conversation with Tilda: every message, in order, and what she took from each one.
• The shelf itself — which three books, what you swapped out, and anything you wrote in a feedback box.
• Your shipping address, once there is something to post.
• Ordinary site measurements: which pages, which buttons, how long you stayed, and any error the page threw. No name is attached to those.

We do not ask for a password, because there is no account. During the beta your invite link is the whole of your identity here.

The conversation with Tilda

Tilda is an AI. She reads what you type and proposes three books from it. That conversation is written down and kept.

The reason is narrow. A shelf can be wrong in two different ways: Tilda can mishear you, or she can hear you exactly right and still choose badly. The summary she extracts cannot tell those apart — it is the conclusion, not the evidence. Only the conversation shows which happened, and a conversation that was never written down is gone the moment the tab closes. We read them to fix the recommendations, and for nothing else.

How long

Six months from your last message, then the messages are deleted automatically. Six months rather than a year because it covers the whole three-month shipment and the weeks after it, which is as long as a transcript is any use to us. What outlives it is the summary Tilda derived and the plain counts — how many turns, whether it ended in a shelf — with the words themselves gone.

Deleting it sooner

Write to hello@readthemwell.com from the address you signed up with and say you want your conversation deleted. We will do it within 30 days and write back when it is done. You do not have to give a reason, and it does not cancel your gift.

The person you are buying for

You are describing someone who has not visited this site and has not agreed to anything. That is unusual enough that we would rather say it here than let you find it out later.

What ends up stored about your reader is their first name, the day you choose to tell them, their shipping address, and whatever you told Tilda — in your words, as you typed them. People describing someone they love tend to mention real things: a bereavement, an illness, a bad year, a faith, a divorce. Tilda asks about reading rather than about any of that, but she is not going to stop you, and often it is the reason a particular book is the right one.

It is used to choose their books and to post them. It is not combined with anything bought from anyone else, not used to advertise to them, and not sold.

If you are the reader

Write to hello@readthemwell.com from the address your shelf was sent to, or tell us who sent it. We will show you everything held about you, correct anything wrong, and delete it within 30 days if you want it gone.

Two limits, said plainly. Deleting the conversation does not un-choose books that were already chosen from it. And if the gift is still running we have to keep your name and address until the last book is posted, because otherwise we cannot post it.

What this site puts on your device

No cookies. Two small things, both of which disappear when you close the tab:

• A session id. It is how the rate limiter counts one person once, and how a click on the homepage and a swap on your shelf can be read as the same visit rather than two strangers.
• Where you arrived from — the referring site, and any campaign tag on the link you clicked. Recorded once, at the first page, so that moving to a second page does not re-report you as having arrived from nowhere.

Nothing is kept between visits.

Payment

Stripe takes the payment. Your card details go from your browser to Stripe and never reach our servers; what comes back to us is the last four digits, the amount, and whether it worked. Stripe holds that data under their own privacy policy.

Who else sees any of this

Five companies, each doing one job:

• Supabase — the database and the code behind it. Everything above lives there.
• OpenAI — Tilda's replies are produced by their model, so what you type is sent to them to answer, under their API terms.
• Stripe — payment, as above.
• Postmark — sends the email, and therefore holds your address and what we sent you.
• Netlify — serves these pages.

Nobody else. No advertising network, no analytics company, no third-party tag on any page of this site.

Where we operate

Read Them Well ships within the United States, and this policy is written for that. Your data is stored in the United States. We are not set up to take orders in the UK or the EU yet, and this page will need rewriting before we are.

Age

You have to be 18 to buy a gift, and the reader has to be an adult as well. The shop is adult trade books — nothing children's, middle grade or young adult — so a shelf for a nine-year-old is not something we can pick well, and we would rather say so than pick badly.

Tilda now does say so. If what you tell her describes a child, she stops there instead of picking three grown-up books, and what she had started writing down — the name, the notes, all of it — is dropped on the spot. She is reading your description, not checking an age, so she can get it wrong in either direction.

Which makes this a request as much as a rule: do not describe a child to Tilda. We are not set up to hold a child's details and would rather not receive them. If it happens anyway, write to hello@readthemwell.com and we will delete it.

If this changes

The date at the top moves and we email anyone on the list about anything that matters. We would not start using the conversations for something new without asking first.

Asking us anything

hello@readthemwell.com. A person reads it.

Read Them Well · Los Angeles, California