Terms

kedaikarya is a directory, a journal and an archive of zines and photobooks made in Malaysia. It is run by one person.

No money passes through this site. We take no payments, hold no stock, post no parcels and take no cut. You can claim a copy here and the maker will be told you want it, but you pay them directly, however the two of you arrange it. Every link on a work’s page likewise goes straight to the maker.

That is the trade-off of a place that takes nothing, and it is worth being plain about: because we never see the money, we cannot get it back for you. There is no escrow, no refund button and no record here of what was paid. If a parcel never arrived, the person to talk to is the maker.

Tell us anyway. We cannot recover your money, but somebody taking payment and not sending books is exactly the sort of thing that gets a page closed.

Some works can be claimed here. Claiming sets one copy aside for a number of days the maker chooses, and tells them who you are — your name and your email address, so they can write to you.

It is not a purchase and nothing is charged. It is a way of saying you want it, and of stopping somebody else taking the same copy while you and the maker sort out paying.

The hold has a date on it, shown to both of you from the moment it is made. After that the copy goes back on the shelf by itself. Nobody is in trouble when that happens — it is what the date is for.

If you change your mind, say so. There is a button for it, and using it puts the copy back straight away instead of leaving a maker waiting a week for somebody who is not coming. Going quiet is the only thing here that is genuinely rude.

If you are the maker: a claim is somebody trusting you before you have given them anything. Answer it. If you cannot honour it — the last copy went at a fair, the print run was short — release it and tell them why. Taking money and not sending the book, more than once, closes your page.

Every maker is read by a person before they appear. There is no automatic approval and no way to pay for one.

You may list up to 10 works. The cap is deliberate: a shelf of chosen things reads better than an archive of everything you have ever printed.

It costs nothing, and we take no percentage of anything you sell through it. If that ever changes, anyone already here will be told well in advance, and nothing already published will be taken down because of it.

Being chosen for the homepage is a curator’s decision and is never for sale. There is no way to pay for a better position here, at any price.

You keep the copyright in your work and your photographs. Listing something here gives us permission to show your images, your words and the details of the book in order to present it on this site — the homepage, the shelf, an announcement, a review. Nothing more.

You can take your listings down whenever you like, and we will not keep showing them afterwards.

We may quote from a book in a review, the way any publication would. Reviews are our own writing and our own opinion; nobody pays to be written about, and we will say when something did not work.

When you publish a work we ask for one copy for the archive. Where we can, we would rather collect it in person and talk to you about the book while we are there — that conversation becomes an interview in the journal, and you see it before it goes up. If meeting is not practical, posting it is fine.

Either way the copy is catalogued the way a library would do it and kept on a shelf in Kuala Lumpur. We do not sell it, lend it or scan it.

At the same time we ask a second question: may that work appear in a printed record of the archive one day? You can say yes, no, or ask me again when it is real. Saying no changes nothing else — your copy is still kept and catalogued.

We ask years before there is a publisher or a budget, because chasing two hundred people for permission against somebody’s deadline is how an archive book quietly fails to happen. Not answering is not the same as saying yes, and it is never treated as one.

Sending a copy is not a condition of being listed. We would like one. You are allowed to say no to that too.

Work that is not yours to list — copied, traced or reprinted from someone else without their say-so. Counterfeits. Anything that exists to demean people for who they are.

Links must go where they say they go. A link that leads somewhere other than your own shop, social account or a place your work is genuinely sold will be removed, and repeated attempts will close your page.

Every maker is read by a person before they appear, so this rarely comes up. It is written down so that a removal is never arbitrary.

To list here we keep your name, your email address and the details of your page. There are no bank details, because there are no payments.

Your email address is used to reach you about your own listings and nothing else. It is never sold, never shared and never added to a mailing list you did not ask for.

Ask us and we will tell you exactly what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it and close your page.

The full account — including who else handles it and how long it is kept — is on the privacy notice, which is also in Bahasa Malaysia.

The date at the top is the version you agreed to. If the substance changes, that date changes with it, and anyone affected is asked again rather than quietly held to something they never read.

Anything unclear here, ask. About has how to reach us.