Ebook marketplace
Ebook Buyer Licence
The non-transferable personal-use licence granted to every ChefSphere ebook buyer — what you can do with a purchased ebook, what you cannot, and how downloads and the library interact with refunds.
This Ebook Buyer Licence describes what you get when you buy a cookbook on the ChefSphere Ebook Marketplace. It complements the Ebook Marketplace Terms, the Ebook Refund Policy, and the Platform Terms of Service.
1. What you are buying
When you purchase an ebook you do not purchase the copyright or any share of it. You purchase a licence to read and use the ebook under the conditions in this document. The copyright remains with the ebook's Author (for third-party ebooks) or with ChefSphere (for Official Ebooks).
2. The scope of your licence
We grant you a worldwide, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable-for-cause licence to:
- read the ebook inside the ChefSphere apps for iOS, Android, and the ChefSphere website;
- download the ebook file to your personal devices where that feature is made available, solely for offline reading on the ChefSphere reader;
- keep the ebook in your ChefSphere library for the normal service lifetime described in section 7;
- use recipes from the ebook in your own kitchen for personal, non-commercial cooking;
- create private reading notes, highlights, and bookmarks within your account.
3. What the licence does not allow
Without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, you may not:
- copy, reproduce, or redistribute the ebook file or any substantial part of its text, images, recipes, or formatting outside your personal devices;
- post, upload, share, or publicly perform the ebook (including via cloud folders, chat groups, email lists, or content-sharing sites);
- sell, rent, lend, sublicense, or otherwise transfer the ebook to another person or account;
- decompile, reverse-engineer, strip watermarks, remove or alter copyright or author attribution, or circumvent any technical protection applied to the file (DRM, watermarking, domain restrictions, download caps);
- use scripts, bots, or automation to download, scrape, or archive ebooks beyond the documented reader behaviour;
- commercialise recipes from the ebook (for example, republishing them in a competing cookbook, in a paid blog post, or as menu copy for a restaurant) unless the Author grants you a separate commercial licence in writing;
- use the ebook to train or fine-tune a machine-learning model, or to build any dataset for that purpose, unless both the Author and ChefSphere agree in writing.
4. Anti-fraud and per-buyer limits
To protect Authors and the Marketplace, the reader enforces reasonable fair-use limits. In normal use you will never notice these. They exist so that a small number of bad actors cannot abuse the service on behalf of everyone else. The current limits include, but are not limited to:
- a rolling cap on the number of download retries per purchase;
- per-buyer daily refund ceilings (see the Ebook Refund Policy);
- watermarking of downloaded files with account metadata so that leaked copies can be traced back to the leaker.
5. How downloads interact with refunds
Any manual download of an ebook file makes that purchase ineligible for a refund under the Ebook Refund Policy. Reading inside the ChefSphere reader without downloading does not trigger this rule until you cross the activity thresholds set out in the Refund Policy (three pages read, ten minutes of reading time, or more than one reading session). If you are unsure whether the ebook is right for you, read the available sample first; request the refund before downloading; or stay under the thresholds while you test the recipes.
6. Official Ebooks vs. third-party ebooks
- Official Ebooks (authored or exclusively licensed by ChefSphere) are licensed to you by ChefSphere directly. Refunds and takedowns for Official Ebooks are handled end-to-end by ChefSphere.
- Third-party ebooks are licensed by the individual Author; ChefSphere administers the transaction, the file hosting, and the refund/chargeback flow, but the underlying licence is with the Author.
7. Availability of your library
We aim to keep every ebook you purchase accessible in your library for the normal commercial life of the Marketplace. However, an ebook can be removed from sale and, in rare cases, from your library if:
- the copyright holder issues a valid takedown we are required to honour (see the Platform Copyright & DMCA Policy);
- a court or regulator orders removal;
- the ebook is found to contain material that is illegal in your jurisdiction;
- the Author is terminated for fraud, and continued access would keep us in breach of our payment-partner rules.
In each of those cases we will offer you a pro-rata refund from the Author's balance (or, for Official Ebooks, from our own account) where you are reasonably disadvantaged and the law requires it. We will notify affected buyers in-app and by email.
8. Sharing, gifting, and family accounts
The buyer licence is personal. Family- and partner-zone sharing inside the ChefSphere apps (Premium/Pro zones) does not create a sharing right for purchased ebooks; each household member who wants to read the ebook must own their own copy. Gifting an ebook to another ChefSphere user is only supported where the in-app "gift" flow is explicitly provided; using a different method (sharing a login, sending the file, printing the recipes for resale) is a breach of this licence.
9. Price, VAT, currency
- The price shown on the ebook detail page is the price you will be charged. Where ChefSphere is required to collect VAT it is included in the displayed consumer price; see the Ebook Tax Information.
- The reference currency is EUR. Other display currencies are approximations; the actual settlement currency depends on your payment method.
10. Consumer rights (EU)
- As an EU consumer you lose the 14-day right of withdrawal for digital content supplied not on a tangible medium once performance has begun, provided you have given prior express consent to immediate performance and have expressly acknowledged that this consent causes the loss of the right of withdrawal (Art. 16(m) of Directive 2011/83/EU). Both statements are collected as separate checkout controls when you confirm the order; the purchase receipt records them on a durable medium (Art. 8(7) of the Directive). The voluntary 7-day platform refund window in the Ebook Refund Policy is offered on top of this statutory minimum.
- You still benefit from the more protective 7-day refund window described in the Ebook Refund Policy, from any non-waivable consumer-protection rights in your country of residence, and from national alternative dispute resolution (ADR) entities notified under Directive 2013/11/EU. The EU Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform was discontinued on 20 July 2025 by Regulation (EU) 2024/3228.
11. Enforcement
Breach of this Licence may lead to removal of the ebook from your library without refund, suspension or termination of your ChefSphere account, a safety-limit alert, and — for serious infringement — civil claims by the Author or by ChefSphere. Where the breach constitutes a criminal offence (piracy for commercial gain, circumvention of technical protection) we may also refer the matter to law-enforcement authorities.
12. Changes
We will post a new version of this Licence when the reader, the library, or applicable law changes materially. Material changes take effect no sooner than 30 days after we have notified you in-app or by email and apply only to ebooks purchased after that effective date.
13. Contact
- Buyer support: [email protected]
- Billing, refunds, invoices: [email protected]
- Copyright complaints: [email protected]
- Legal notices: [email protected]