How to Use My Bookshelf

To use the My Bookshelf site, you’ll need to have a Goodreads account. If you don’t have on yet, you can register for one here.

In your Goodreads account, make a new shelf with whatever name you want. You can do this from any Goodreads book page, or from any other shelf page.

Add all the books you want to be displayed on your virtual bookshelf to that Goodreads shelf.

Go to the Create tab

Here, paste your Goodreads profile URL (or your Goodreads User ID, there’s another FAQ item explaining that) and the name of the shelf you’re using. The name needs to match exactly, with the same capitalization. If Goodreads can’t find the shelf name you provided, it will instead return a list of every book you’ve added on your Goodreads account, which probably isn’t what you’re looking for.

Click “Generate”

Now you’ll be provided the option to sort your books, or to upload spine images for books on shelf that aren’t in the system yet. That’s a different objective, so for now, just click the sort button.

Here you’re given some sort options. There’s a bunch of options, like sorting by author last name, or alphabetically. Pick the one you want. If none of those options are to your liking, click “Sort Manually” and you can drag and drop the books in a list until they’re in the order you want. Once you’ve selected something, click “Generate.”

Once the website has finished creating your virtual bookshelf, it will show you the image it created. You can now either download it, and/or, if you’ve registered an account, save that bookshelf to your profile for later access.