Last updated: 3 November 2026
This page explains what personal information iBookBinding (ibookbinding.com) collects, why, who else handles it, and what you can ask us to do with it.
Who we are
iBookBinding is an educational website about bookbinding, book arts, book conservation and the history of the book. It is run by iBookBinding Ltd, a company in the United Kingdom, which decides how your personal information is used. For anything about your data, write to [email protected].
What we collect, and why
- Visiting the site. Like every website, our servers receive your IP address, browser details and the pages you request. Our hosting provider and our security and caching services use this to deliver the pages, keep the site fast and block attacks. We also count visits with Jetpack Stats, which gives us totals, not profiles of individual readers. When you use the search box on our site, the words you search for are logged with the time, a random visit code and, if you are signed in, your account (never your IP address), so we can see what readers look for and write the articles they can’t find.
- Comments. Comments on our articles are handled by Disqus. When the comments load, Disqus receives your IP address and browser details and may set its own cookies. If you comment, you sign in to Disqus or give it your name and email address. Disqus processes this under its own privacy policy, which also covers its advertising; you can opt out with the “Do Not Sell My Data” link under the comments. Copies of published comments may also be kept on our site so they can be shown and moderated. For older comments made through WordPress’s own form, we keep the name, email address, website (if given), comment and IP address; these were checked for spam by Akismet, and profile pictures come from Gravatar. Email addresses are never published.
- Newsletters and new-post emails. If you subscribe, we keep your email address (and your name, if you give it) to send you what you signed up for. Every email has an unsubscribe link. Sign-up forms are provided by MailerLite; emails about new posts are sent through Jetpack (WordPress.com).
- Purchases. Our shop at store.ibookbinding.com runs on Shopify, which handles orders and payments under its own privacy policy. We keep records of earlier digital orders made on this site (name, email address, what was bought and when) for as long as the law requires us to keep sales records.
- Messages. If you write to us by email or through a contact form, we keep your message and address to reply to you.
- Embedded content. Some articles show videos from YouTube or posts from other sites. When you play or view them, those sites receive your IP address and may set their own cookies, as if you visited them directly.
We don’t sell personal information, and we don’t use it for advertising profiles.
Cookies
We use cookies only where they are needed: to keep members of our team signed in, and for the anti-spam and statistics services above. Disqus sets its own cookies when the comments load, and embedded videos and other sites’ content may set theirs when you use them. You can delete or block cookies in your browser; the site still works without them.
Services that handle data for us
- SiteGround (web hosting) and Cloudflare (delivery and security);
- Automattic (Jetpack: statistics, image delivery, new-post emails, Akismet, Gravatar);
- Disqus (comments);
- MailerLite (our past newsletter list; we no longer take new sign-ups);
- Shopify (our shop);
- Google (YouTube videos and web fonts).
Some of these companies are based outside the UK and the European Economic Area, mainly in the United States. They protect the data with the safeguards the law requires, such as standard contractual clauses.
How we publish to social media
iBookBinding has its own publishing tool on this website. With it, our team plans posts about our articles and videos for the iBookBinding Facebook Page, Instagram account, YouTube channel, Discord server and other channels, and the tool publishes them at the planned time through each platform’s official interface (for Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s Graph API; for YouTube, Google’s YouTube Data API; for Discord, a webhook of each channel).
- It publishes only iBookBinding’s own posts, to accounts we own.
- To confirm a post went out, it reads our own Page’s and account’s recent posts (their text, time and link). To learn which of our own posts were shared most, it also reads the totals of our past posts.
- It does not collect, store or use information about people who see, like or comment on our posts, or about any other Facebook or Instagram user.
- The access keys Meta, Google and Discord give us are stored encrypted on our server and used only for these tasks. We can withdraw them at any time.
- To make sure the tool keeps running, our server sends a plain signal every few minutes to Healthchecks.io, a monitoring service that tells us if the signals stop. The signal carries nothing about our posts or about anyone.
Our team members have accounts on this website to plan posts; we keep their names, email addresses and a record of what they changed.
How we research articles
We use an AI service (Claude, by Anthropic) to help research and draft articles from public web pages, and to rate public news articles from sources we chose as possible links to share (only their titles, short summaries and the source’s name are sent). A person checks and edits every article before it is published, and decides which links to share. No information about our readers, commenters or subscribers is sent to it.
How long we keep it
Comments stay until they are removed. Subscriptions last until you unsubscribe. Messages are kept for as long as we need them to deal with your request. Sales records are kept for as long as the law requires. Server logs are kept by our hosting provider for a short period and then deleted. Searches made with the site’s search box are kept for 12 months, then deleted automatically.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct it, delete it or stop using it. Where you gave consent (for example, for a newsletter), you can withdraw it at any time. Write to [email protected]; we reply within one month. If you aren’t happy with our answer, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).
Deleting your data
To have your comments, subscription or other data removed, write to [email protected] from the email address you used, or tell us which comment or order it is. We confirm when it’s done.
Children
This site is for a general audience and is not aimed at children under 13. We don’t knowingly collect information from them.
Changes
When we change how we handle personal information, we update this page and the date at the top.