Last updated: 2026-10-14
This page answers the five questions people actually ask before handing a book to a translation service. Our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are the binding documents; this is the same content in the words people use to ask about it.
Every answer below was checked against the running system — the storage configuration, the code that moves your file, and the database — not against what we would like to be true. The retention and deletion answers were last re-checked on 2026-10-08, when automatic deletion and the delete button shipped; file storage encryption and new uploads were verified on 2026-10-14, and the model-training advice was updated on 2026-10-10. The other facts were last checked on 2026-08-04. Where the honest answer is "not yet" or "we can't promise that on someone else's behalf," it says so.
The short version
Thirty days. Your book and everything made from it are deleted automatically 30 days after the translation finishes; a book you upload but never translate is deleted 30 days after the upload. Your dashboard shows the exact date next to each book, so you know when to download yours by.
Four things exist after a translation runs, and all four go on that date:
The working copies are the exception, and they go much sooner. While a translation is running we unpack your book onto the translation server, and those unpacked files are deleted as soon as the finished EPUB is packaged — every run, automatically.
The one thing that is not deleted is the record that the book existed — its file name, size, status and dates — because your orders and credit history point at it. That is metadata about the file, never its contents.
A book that is still being translated, or that is with us for manual repair after a translation could not finish on its own, is not deleted while that is in progress; the 30 days start when it is done.
Uploads and newly generated EPUB files written after server-side encryption was enabled are encrypted at rest in our file storage using AES-256. HTTPS and expiring signed links protect uploads and downloads in transit. This encryption covers stored EPUB files, not the chapter text stored in our database.
The transit half in detail: your browser uploads the file directly to storage over HTTPS, using a signed link we generate for that one file, which stops working after 10 minutes. Downloads use the same mechanism with a link that expires after 30 minutes. The bucket is private, so your book has no public URL and nothing in it can be fetched by anyone without a valid signed link.
The at-rest half in detail: our cloud storage encrypts new file writes using AES-256 in our private storage bucket. We verified ordinary uploads, multipart uploads and the write method used for generated EPUBs on 2026-10-14, including signed downloads with matching file hashes.
Chapter text, original and translated, is stored separately in our database and protected by access control. The file storage encryption setting does not cover that database or the translation server's temporary working copies.
Not by us. We build and train no models, we do not use your book to improve anything of ours, and we do not sell it or share it beyond what is described here. Translating it does mean sending its chapters to a third-party large language model API whose own privacy policy reserves the right to use inputs and outputs to train and improve its models — that is another company's policy, and we cannot waive it for them. So our advice depends on the book: if it is already published, this is nothing to worry about; if it is an unpublished manuscript, we recommend you don't upload it.
Published books: nothing to worry about. If the book is already published — a novel you bought, a public-domain title, anything already out in the world — a provider seeing its text exposes nothing that isn't already public. This is the same as pasting chapters into any AI chatbot yourself.
Unpublished manuscripts: we recommend you don't upload them. Drafts, manuscripts under submission, anything under NDA or that has to stay confidential — please don't send these to EPUB Translator. That is our own recommendation, not small print, and we would rather lose the upload than have you find this out afterwards.
The detail, since it decides the question for some people: the book goes out one chunk at a time, and the provider's API terms do not carve developer traffic out of the training clause in its privacy policy. There is no zero-retention tier in the arrangement we use today, so we are not going to tell you your book will never be trained on.
Yes. Every book in your dashboard has a Delete button. After you confirm, it removes the uploaded EPUB, both translated EPUBs, the stored chapter text and the translation-call log for that book straight away — the same things the 30-day expiry removes, without the wait. It cannot be undone. A book that is being translated at that moment can be deleted as soon as the translation finishes.
Deleting your whole account is still done by email: write to support@epubtranslator.app from the address on your account and we remove the account record along with any books still stored.
Payment records are the one thing we cannot purge on request: Paddle is the merchant of record for every order and holds that data for as long as tax law requires of it, and we keep our own order and credit records so that what you paid for stays accounted for.
For email requests our Privacy Policy commits us to the response times set by applicable law — 30 days under GDPR — and in practice it is much faster, because a person reads that inbox.
You do. A translation is a derivative work of the book it came from, and our Terms of Service state that copyright in the translation belongs entirely to you: we do not own, claim, or participate in any rights in it. That is not a licence we grant back to you — we never take the rights in the first place.
The chain holds upstream as well. The provider's API terms assign any rights in the output to the API customer, which is us, and we pass them straight through to you rather than sitting on them.
What this does not do is give you rights to the source book. Translating a book you do not own or have permission to translate does not make the result yours to publish, and our Terms put that responsibility on the person who uploads.
We log the file name, the file size, and what happened to it — uploaded, translated, failed — to our own analytics, so that a broken upload can be told apart from an abandoned one. That is metadata about the file, never its contents.
Payment data never touches our servers at all. Paddle is the merchant of record for every order and handles card details directly; we see that an order was paid, not how it was paid.
Email support@epubtranslator.app. If the answer turns out to be something other people would want before uploading, it belongs on this page, and we will add it here rather than reply to one person at a time.