How to Find Book Dimensions
Regrettably, I haven’t found a foolproof way to source physical dimensions of a book yet. The most consistent place I’ve found is Amazon. But just searching the book title doesn’t always work. You’ve got to make sure you find the right edition. And Amazon, you know, the company originally created to sell books, absolutely sucks at letting me search by edition. You can click “hardcover” or “paperback” or “mass market paperback” and hope that printing lines up with the spine image you found.
From there, scroll down on the page (or press ctrl+f) and search for the term “dimensions”. There’s the data we need. The bookshelf website (currently) only takes input in inches. You can just copy the text in the dimensions area (excluding the “inches” if it’s present) and paste that in the bookshelf website. It should look something like “6 x 0.7 x 9”.
A more consistent way to find the exact edition you’re looking for is via the ISBN. Copy that and paste it directly in the Amazon search bar, and in most cases, the book edition you’re looking for will pop up. If that edition doesn’t have any dimensions listed, you can just base your dimension input off the default provided for the given format. Or just guess. The bookshelf website only really cares about the height and width of a book. Most books are 7-9 inches tall, and .5-1.5 inches wide. An input like “5 x 8 x 0.8”, while an inaccurate guess, will most likely look okay. Oh, and the order of the numbers doesn’t matter. The largest number is always recognized as the height, the middlest as the length (which we ignore anyways), and the smallest as the width.
Sometimes the dimensions on Amazon aren’t accurate. You’ll notice this when the bookshelf website places a spine that just appears stretched. In those cases, you can either manually adjust the dimensions till it looks right, or break out a ruler and measure the physical book yourself (if you have a copy).
I’m not sure why Amazon bothers to include the dimensions on the product page in the first place, as I highly doubt there’s any worthwhile amount of customers basing their purchase off a book’s height. I suspect that data is gathered moreso for Amazon shipping warehouses, so they can estimate what size/kind of packaging they’ll need to ship your order.