Privacy & legal notice

1. Who operates this website

Required by Article 5 of Directive 2000/31/EC on electronic commerce, as implemented in national law.

Operator

FULL LEGAL NAME OR COMPANY NAME

Postal address

STREET, CITY, POSTCODE, COUNTRY

Electronic mail

A REAL, MONITORED ADDRESS

Company registration

REGISTRATION NUMBER, OR DELETE THIS ROW IF YOU ARE AN INDIVIDUAL

The postal address, telephone number and registration number shown elsewhere on this site belong to the fictional publisher and are invented. The telephone number is drawn from the range reserved by Ofcom for use in drama and fiction, and reaches nobody.

2. This website is fiction

Halbrook Educational Publishing Ltd does not exist and never did. Its books, staff, authors, catalogue, history and correspondence are invented for an interactive fiction project. Any resemblance to a real publisher, imprint or person is coincidental.

Nothing here is an offer of goods or services. No orders can be placed, no payment is taken and no goods will be sent.

3. What personal data is processed

Information required by Articles 13 and 14 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR).

Server logs

The web server records each request. That record contains your IP address, the time of the request, the address requested, the HTTP status returned, and the user agent string your browser sends. An IP address is personal data, so this section applies even though we make no attempt to identify anyone.

Purpose

Operating the server, diagnosing faults, and identifying abuse such as scanning or denial-of-service traffic.

Legal basis

Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — the legitimate interest of the operator in running a functioning and secure website. We have weighed this against your interests and consider the impact low, because the data is never used to build a profile, never combined with anything else, and never used to contact or identify you.

Retention

30 days, after which log files are deleted automatically by rotation.

Recipients

Nobody. The logs stay on the server. They are not shared, sold or transferred.

Processor

The hosting provider operates the machine and therefore has technical access.

Everything else

This is a static website. There is no database, no user account, no newsletter, no comment form and no contact form. Nothing you type into this site is transmitted anywhere.

In particular, the edition check compares what you type against a list held inside the page itself, in your own browser. The ISBN you enter is never sent to the server and is not recorded.

No tracking

This website uses no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, no social media buttons, no embedded video, no web fonts loaded from elsewhere and no content delivery network. It makes no connection to any third party. There is nothing here to consent to except the item in section 4.

4. Storage on your device

Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC) covers anything stored on or read from your device, not only cookies. The European Data Protection Board confirmed the breadth of that wording in Guidelines 2/2023.

This site sets no cookies. It uses two entries in your browser's local storage:

hep_visits — asked for, refusable

A number, counting how many times you have opened the site. It exists so that a shortcut appears in the footer on your third visit. It is not necessary to deliver the website, so it is only written after you press Allow. It contains a number and nothing else, it is never read by us and never leaves your browser.

hep_storage_consent — strictly necessary

Records whether you pressed Allow or No thank you. Without it the site would forget your answer and ask again on every page. Set only once you have answered.

If you refuse, nothing is stored beyond your refusal, and the site works normally.

Change your mind

Withdrawing must be as easy as consenting, so it is one button:

Erase stored data and withdraw consent

You can also clear site data for this domain in your browser settings, which has the same effect. Both leave you as an entirely new visitor.

5. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to ask for access to your personal data (Article 15), rectification (16), erasure (17), restriction of processing (18), data portability (20), and to object to processing based on legitimate interest (21). Where processing rests on consent, you may withdraw it at any time without giving a reason, and withdrawal does not affect what was lawful beforehand.

In practice there is very little to exercise these rights against. We hold no account, no name and no address for you. The only record is a server log line keyed to an IP address, which we cannot connect to a person without information we do not have and do not want. If you write to us with the IP address and the approximate time, we will search the logs and act on your request.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, normally the one for the country where you live or work.

6. Accessibility

Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, applies from 28 June 2025 to services such as e-commerce, banking, transport ticketing and e-books. This site is none of those and sells nothing, so it falls outside that scope. It is nevertheless built as plain semantic HTML, works without JavaScript apart from the two features described above, scales to any window size and has no time limits or motion effects. If something here is unusable for you, please write and say so.

7. Content generated with AI

Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (the AI Act) has applied since 2 August 2026. It requires anyone deploying an AI system that generates or manipulates images, audio or video to disclose that the content is artificial.

Some of the imagery on this site — principally the book cover artwork — was produced using generative AI tools and then selected and edited by us. Parts of the written copy were drafted with AI assistance and revised under human editorial responsibility. Nothing here depicts a real person, and no real person's likeness or voice has been synthesised.

Article 50(4) provides that where such content forms part of an evidently artistic, creative, satirical or fictional work, the obligation is reduced: the existence of the generated content must be disclosed in a manner that does not hamper the display or enjoyment of the work. This website is a fictional work, which is why this disclosure sits here, on the page that already steps outside the story, rather than stamped across the artwork.

Marking generated output in a machine-readable form is an obligation on the providers of the AI systems concerned, under Article 50(2), rather than on us as a deployer. Where the tools we used embed such markers, they have been left intact.

8. Contact

For anything on this page, including data protection requests, write to A REAL, MONITORED ADDRESS. Please do not use the fictional office address in the footer; nobody collects post there.

Last reviewed DATE.