How to Contribute Book Spines
- Login to or Create a My Bookshelf Account
- Click on the “Contribute” tab
- Find the book (and the matching edition) you want to upload a spine for on Goodreads.
- Copy the Goodreads URL for that book (You can also do this on mobile by clicking the share icon, then “Copy”)
- Paste that URL into the textbox on the contribute page
- Click “Get Book Data”
- Most of the data should be filled out on this page - things like the title, the author, the publication date, etc. These prefilled values need to be exact, so the website won’t let you alter them. Some fields might be empty, and you’ll need to manually provide that data. The one piece you’ll always need to provide is the book dimensions, given in inches.
- Provide the book dimensions, following the format 1x2x3. The order of height, width, and length, doesn’t matter. They just need to be separated by an “x”. For a guide on finding the book dimensions online, see the other FAQ item. If the dimensions you provide don’t match the actual book spine image, when the image is applied to a virtual bookshelf, it will look stretched/shrunk/bad.
- Click “Choose File” and upload a png or jpg of your book spine. The site restricts the maximum file size to 5mb, so if your image is too big, use a website like https://tinypng.com/ to compress it.
- Click “Upload”. The website will notify you if anything is wrong with your data, or if the upload fails. If everything works as expected, you will be notified that the upload was successful, and the website will return you to where you were last.
If you’re trying to create a virtual bookshelf and some spines are missing, you can also upload them on that page. The website will tell you how many spines are missing, from there click “Upload Missing Spines”. This will show all the missing books in alphabetical order. If you click “Upload” here, it will jump automatically to step 7 above and you can repeat the same process. I found this method was faster than searching goodreads for each individual book, if I already had images for spines on a given shelf.
For every book spine you upload, your tally on the site leaderboard will go up.