Earmark
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The deal

What you can expect, and what we ask

Last reviewed 22 September 2026

Earmark is free, has nothing to sell you and is run by one person. This is the deal in plain words: what our verdicts are and are not, what you may do with them, whose figures they are built on, and the rule we hold ourselves to hardest, which is what has to be true before we will name a narrator as the weaker half of a book.

The short version

A verdict is an opinion, not a fact

Earmark answers one question, which format deserves the one and only first encounter with a book, and it answers it with an opinion. The opinion is built from public evidence about books, plus a handful of judgements we declared out loud rather than measured, and it has never been tested against a real reader’s verdict. We say so on House Rules as well, because it is the sort of thing a site is tempted to bury.

So: do not quote us as an impartial rating. We are not one and we have never claimed to be. Every page shows the figures the call was read off, including the ones that undercut it, precisely so that disagreeing with us is easy and well informed. Nothing here is advice about anything weightier than how to spend an evening.

It is free, and there is nothing to buy

Earmark costs nothing. There is no subscription, no advertising, no affiliate link and no button that sends you to a shop with our code attached. We do not link out to shops at all. Nobody has ever paid to be on the shelf, and nobody could pay to be in the Hall of Fame or kept out of it: the criteria are published and counted, and that is the whole point of publishing them.

If Earmark ever has to cost something to keep running, we will say so plainly and in advance. What will not happen is a shelf becoming purchasable.

What you may do with what you find here

You are welcome to read the site, share links to it, quote a verdict or a sentence of ours somewhere else with a link back, and screenshot a page. None of that needs asking. If it makes somebody read a book they would otherwise have missed, so much the better.

Two things we ask you not to do. Do not copy the library wholesale. Scraping every page, or lifting the corpus and its scores into another product and presenting it as yours, is the one use that takes the work and leaves the point behind. And do not present our verdict as an impartial industry rating, for the reason in the section above.

If you want to do something automated and reasonable with the site, ask first at milobedini64@gmail.com. It is a small server and a polite request is likely to get a yes.

Whose figures these are

Our words, our scores and the way we lay them out are ours. That includes the verdicts, the prose on every page, and the model that produced them.

The figures underneath are not ours and we do not pretend otherwise. Ratings, distributions and runtimes come from the crowds who produced them and from the sites that gathered them: Goodreads, Hardcover and Audible. We keep summary figures only. We hold no audio and no review text, and we never will: reviews are read to derive an aggregate and then discarded.

Book titles, authors, narrators, publishers, series and prize names belong to their owners. Naming them here is description, which is what a site about books is made of, and not a claim on anybody’s mark.

When we name a narrator

This is the clause we take most seriously. Saying that a book is worse in audio can amount to saying a named person did their job badly, and that person is usually a working freelancer with a career.

So there is a published bar and we hold ourselves to it: we will only let the recording carry the blame where at least 250 people have rated that reading, and we print the count next to the claim so you can see what it rests on. Below that bar we tell you what we cannot judge instead of telling you whose fault it is. House Rules explains the number.

We also never recommend a machine-read edition, and that is not a slight on anyone’s work. It is a statement about what the thing is. A narrator’s timing is part of the performance and a generated voice has none to have.

If you are a narrator, an author, a publisher or a rights-holder and we have printed something wrong about your work (the wrong recording, a misspelt name, a runtime that is not yours, a prize we missed), write to milobedini64@gmail.com and we will fix it. That is a promise about accuracy. It is not a promise to change a verdict you dislike, and we would rather be straight with you about the difference.

What we cannot promise

Earmark is offered as it is. It is one person’s project on a small server, so it may be down, it may be slow, and a page may be wrong in a way we have not noticed yet. A book you want may not be here at all: the library grows in reviewed batches and never because somebody searched for it, so an absence is honest rather than a failed search.

We fix what we can and we would rather hear about a fault than not. But a free website about books cannot carry liability for what follows from reading it, and to the extent the law allows we do not accept any. Where the law does not allow that (death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or fraud), nothing here limits anything, because it cannot and should not.

Your account

You can sign in to Earmark, with Google or with an email address and a password. You do not have to: every page here is readable signed out, and an account changes nothing about what a verdict says. An account is yours: yours to use, yours to delete, and we will not sell it or hand it on. The privacy notice says exactly what is held, which today is your email address, a display name, the date you joined and the books you save.

We ask two things of you in return, and they are the ordinary two: use an address you actually control, and do not make accounts in somebody else’s name.

The one thing an account will never do is change the call. What we learn about you changes what a page shows you and never what the model thinks.

These parts are not built yet. There is no record of what you have read and no notes to write, so the rules for them are a forecast rather than a term you are agreeing to.

When shelving and private notes exist, deleting your account will take the notes with it. We will keep the right to close an account being used to harass someone. That matters most for the public reviews planned after shelving, which are a different thing from Earmark’s own verdict and carry their own duty to moderate. Their rules will be written and published before anyone can post one, not improvised afterwards.

Which law applies, and how this changes

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales are where any dispute about them would be settled.

The date at the top of the page says when these words were last looked at. It moves when they change and not when the site is rebuilt. A change that matters gets said out loud on the site; a typo does not.

Anything at all: milobedini64@gmail.com. The privacy notice covers what we know about you, which is almost nothing, and House Rules covers where we stand.