Terms & cancellation

1. Who you are contracting with

Linus Ammer, Alberich-Verlag, Schönrain 10, 84152 Mengkofen, Germany, contact@western-origins.com. The contract language is English.

2. What is being sold

A pre-order for Western Origins — Indo-European Homeland, Expansion and Character, by Linus Ammer, in one of two editions. Publication is planned for May 2027.

The printed edition is a hardcover, sent to you by post. It costs €25.00 per copy for delivery within Europe and $28.00 per copy elsewhere. Shipping is charged in addition, at the rate for your delivery region.

The e-book is digital content, supplied as a file. It costs €17.00 or $19.00, one file per order, and no shipping is charged on it. Because nothing is posted, an e-book order has no delivery region: the region control on the order page then chooses only the currency you are charged in.

The whole order is charged in one currency, and the total is displayed before you pay. No VAT is shown or charged: the seller applies the small-business rule under § 19 UStG.

3. How a contract comes about

Placing a pre-order is your offer. The contract is concluded when we confirm the order by email, or at the latest when the payment is captured. The order details are shown to you in Stripe’s checkout before you confirm, and again in the receipt Stripe sends.

4. Payment

Payment is taken at the time of ordering, not at dispatch. Payments are processed by Stripe; we do not receive or store card details.

5. Delivery

Copies are dispatched from Germany after publication, planned for May 2027. You will be contacted by email beforehand so that you can confirm or correct your delivery address.

Shipping is charged once per order and steps with the size of the parcel your order needs, so several copies never cost as much as the same number of separate orders. The rate is shown before you pay.

Orders of one or two copies are sent as an untracked letter or small packet. Orders of three copies or more travel as a parcel, which is tracked and insured. Until the book is delivered to you the risk of loss in transit is ours, whichever service is used.

Where an order is going outside the European Union, customs duty, import VAT and the carrier’s handling fee may be charged on delivery. Those are set by the destination country and are payable by the recipient.

If publication is delayed we will tell you, and you may cancel at that point for a full refund. If the book cannot be published at all, every pre-order is refunded in full without you having to ask.

The e-book

We agree with you that the e-book is provided on publication in May 2027, and not before. It is sent to the email address you give at checkout, as an attachment or as a download link valid for at least 30 days, and we will re-send it on request if you lose it.

The file is supplied as EPUB, and it is personalised: your name and order number are written into the copy you receive, visibly in the imprint and invisibly in the file, so that a copy found in circulation can be traced back to the order it came from. That is the only protection it carries. There is no device lock, no account to create and no licence server to ask for permission, so the file opens in any EPUB reader — e-readers, tablets, phones and desktop applications alike — and it goes on working if this shop ever closes.

Two limits worth knowing before you buy. An Amazon Kindle does not accept an EPUB copied across by hand; Amazon's own Send to Kindle service will take one and convert it, and the personalisation survives that. And the book carries around fifty detailed maps, which are hard to read on a small e-ink screen whatever the device — a tablet or a computer does them justice, a six-inch reader does not. If that matters to you, the printed edition is the one to buy.

Nothing in the shipping rates, the tracking note or the customs paragraph above applies to the e-book. There is no parcel, no carrier and no border, so no duty or import VAT can arise on it.

6. Cancelling before dispatch

Independently of the statutory right of withdrawal below, you may cancel a pre-order at any time before the book is dispatched or the file is sent, for any reason or none. Write to contact@western-origins.com and the full amount, including any shipping you paid, is refunded to the original payment method. This applies to both editions, and it is deliberately more generous than the law requires — in particular it outlasts the statutory period described below.

7. Statutory right of withdrawal

Right of withdrawal — the printed edition

You have the right to withdraw from this contract within 14 days without giving any reason. The withdrawal period expires 14 days from the day on which you, or a third party other than the carrier indicated by you, acquires physical possession of the goods.

Right of withdrawal — the e-book

You have the right to withdraw from this contract within 14 days without giving any reason. For the e-book the withdrawal period expires 14 days from the day the contract is concluded, because there are no goods to take possession of. Since the file is not provided until publication, this statutory period will normally have ended before anything is sent to you — which is why we grant the wider contractual right in clause 6, cancellable at any time up to the day the file goes out.

How to withdraw

To exercise the right of withdrawal you must inform us — Linus Ammer, Alberich-Verlag, Schönrain 10, 84152 Mengkofen, Germany, contact@western-origins.com — of your decision to withdraw by an unequivocal statement. You may use the model withdrawal form, but it is not obligatory. To meet the deadline it is enough to send your communication before the period expires.

Effects of withdrawal

For the e-book there is nothing to send back and nothing to deduct: we reimburse the full amount, and no compensation for value is payable, because § 357a (3) BGB excludes it for digital content. The paragraphs below about returning goods apply to the printed edition only.

If you withdraw, we will reimburse all payments received from you, including the costs of delivery (except for any supplementary costs arising from your choosing a type of delivery other than the least expensive standard delivery we offer), without undue delay and no later than 14 days from the day on which we are informed of your decision. We will use the same means of payment you used, and it will cost you nothing.

We may withhold reimbursement until we have received the goods back, or until you have supplied evidence of having sent them back, whichever is earliest. You must send the goods back without undue delay and in any event no later than 14 days from the day you communicate your withdrawal. You bear the direct cost of returning the goods. You are liable for any diminished value resulting from handling other than what is necessary to establish the nature, characteristics and functioning of the goods.

Model withdrawal form

To Linus Ammer, Alberich-Verlag, Schönrain 10, 84152 Mengkofen, Germany, contact@western-origins.com: I/We hereby give notice that I/We withdraw from my/our contract of sale of the following goods / for the supply of the following digital content — Western Origins, hardcover edition / e-book edition (delete as appropriate). Ordered on […] / received on […]. Name of consumer(s) […]. Address of consumer(s) […]. Signature of consumer(s) (only if this form is notified on paper) […]. Date […].

8. Faulty or damaged copies

The statutory rules on conformity apply. If your printed copy arrives damaged or misbound, tell us within a reasonable time and we will replace it at our cost, or refund it if no replacement is available.

For the e-book the rules on digital products apply instead. If the file will not open, is corrupt, is missing pages or maps, or does not match what is described above, tell us and we will supply a corrected file at no charge; if we cannot, you may end the contract and have your money back. We will also issue a corrected file if a defect comes to light later, for as long as you can reasonably expect that of a book you have bought once.

9. Applicable law

German law applies. Where you are a consumer resident in another country, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer-protection provisions of the law of your country of residence.