Fine Print

•  We can either (snail) mail a certificate to the recipient directly, or mail one to you for you to wrap and give – we’ll work out those details with you after purchase.

• Gift subscriptions differ from gift certificates in certain important ways: subscriptions are redeemed by the book, not by the dollar amount; subscriptions are tracked separately from the recipient’s regular customer account; subscriptions are redeemed monthly or quarterly over the course of the subscription; gift subscriptions may only be transferred between customers by arrangement with store staff (we need to know who to email!).

• All book choices must be within the standard price range and wholesale margin for the book type – for example, “Adult Hardcover” couldn’t be a $50 illustrated coffee table book, or an academic book that’s priced with a small margin for us on the distribution side. For the same reason, substitutions between categories are not allowed unless the substitution has the same theoretical price per book (for instance, adult paperback and young adult hardcover).

• Subscriptions “unlock” one month or one quarter at a time, but catching up on missed books and making preorders for future intervals are both 100% fine— let’s take the example of a 6-month subscription that starts in January, but the recipient doesn’t reply to our email until February. They tell us about three books they want that we have in stock or can get right away, and also that their favorite author has a book coming out in April. They could choose two of the currently available books for immediate pickup (their January and February books), have us set aside the third book for them to pick up in March, and make the preorder their April book. And of course, they’d still have their May and June book picks to look forward to!

• Recipients have the length of the subscription plus six months to redeem the subscription before it converts to store credit for the recipient. In the unlikely event that subscriptions aren’t fully used within six months of their final month (regardless of the length of the subscription), we reserve the right to credit the recipient’s regular customer account on a prorated basis after giving them one last chance to claim their missing books. (For example: if December is the last month of a twelve-month subscription and two of those books were never chosen, we would email the recipient the following June before marking the subscription as complete and depositing 1/6 of its initial value into their customer account at the end of that month — note that funds in customer accounts may be used at any point in the future but cannot be redeemed for cash.)

• Once a subscription has been given, it belongs to the recipient. Out of respect for our customers’ privacy, we are unable to report back to gift givers on which books subscriptions are used to purchase.