The short version. Pagemoth works without an account, and until you choose to sign in nothing you do in it leaves your phone. There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and nothing is sold or shared. When you do sign in, the only thing that syncs is your own reading — your books, your sessions, and the times you started and stopped.

Before you sign in

The first time you open pagemoth it makes an identifier for you on the device. That is the whole of the setup. You can add books and log sessions straight away, and all of it is written to a database in the app's own storage on your phone.

At this point pagemoth has sent us nothing at all. There is no account, no profile, and no request to our servers carrying anything about you.

If you sign in

Signing in uses Sign in with Apple. Apple tells us an opaque identifier for you and nothing else — not your name, and not your real address if you chose to hide it. We store that identifier so we can recognise you on your next device, along with a token that lets us tell Apple to revoke the connection if you delete your account.

Once you are signed in, these sync to our server so your devices agree with each other:

The books on your shelf, their status, and the page you are on
Your reading sessions — start and end times, pages read, and any note you added
The pause and resume marks inside a session

That is the complete list. There is no location, no contacts, no device fingerprint, no advertising identifier, and no record of anything you do in the app that isn't reading.

This data lives in a Postgres database run by Neon, hosted in the United States. Neon stores it for us and does not use it.

Looking books up

Book covers, titles and page counts come from Open Library, a project of the Internet Archive. Your phone calls Open Library directly, without going through us — which is faster and means we never see what you are searching for, but does mean Open Library sees your IP address when you search or scan a barcode. Their privacy policy governs what they do with it.

When Open Library has nothing, and only then, the app asksGoogle Books instead — that is how books sold straight by their publisher get found at all. That one request does go through our server, because Google requires an API key and a key inside an app can be extracted and abused. So for those searches we see the words you typed, and Google sees our server rather than your phone. We log neither, and we do not attach either to your account. Results that came from Google are labelled as such in the app.

We cache the book records that come back, because a page count for a given edition is the same for everyone. Those cached records are not attached to you.

The waitlist on this site

If you leave an email address to hear about iPad or Android, we store that address and which platform you asked about. It is used once, to tell you that platform has shipped, and for nothing else. It is not attached to a pagemoth account, is never sold or shared, and you can have it removed at any time by writing to [email protected].

This website

No cookies, no analytics, no trackers, no embedded third-party scripts or fonts. The site does not know you were here. The only request it ever makes to us is the one that happens when you submit the waitlist form yourself.

Deleting everything

Account deletion is in the app, under settings. It hard-deletes your rows from our database — no soft delete, no retention window — and tells Apple to revoke the sign-in connection. You are then asked whether you want to keep or wipe the copy on your phone, because that copy is yours and deleting an account shouldn't silently destroy your reading history.

If you never signed in, there is nothing on our side to delete. Deleting the app deletes everything.

Children

Pagemoth is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, the app will say so before the change takes effect rather than quietly updating this page. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Asking us about it

Write to [email protected]. If you want a copy of what we hold, or want it deleted and can't get into the app to do it, that is the address.