Adding several books without losing your evening
Twenty books added one at a time means twenty forms, and nobody reaches the end. In a sequence you scan all the barcodes first, then sort out one book per screen, and publish the lot in one go.
The moment a book-sharing site wins or loses someone is the first upload. A person has decided to offer a slice of their own shelf — twenty, thirty books — and is met with a form. Title, author, year, category, cover. Then again. By the fourth book they close the page, and those thirty books are never seen by anyone.
A sequence exists for that: to separate the physical work from the writing work. First you walk along the shelf with your phone and scan barcodes, thinking about nothing. Then, calmly and possibly on another day, you fill in the details one book per screen.
First act: the barcodes
You start from Open the camera. The camera stays open and doesn't close between books: point it at the code on the back cover, a thumbnail and a counter appear a moment later, move on to the next book. In practice you sweep the shelf the way you'd put shopping through a checkout.
None of what you point the camera at leaves your phone: the code is read by the browser itself, and it is those digits that are sent, not the pictures.
When the shelf is done, press I am done. If some books have no barcode — which is true of almost everything printed before the 1970s, of older foreign editions and of art books — there is Add without a barcode, which opens an empty card to fill in by hand.
Fifty books at a time. That is the ceiling for one sequence, and it is deliberately generous for a sweep of one shelf and deliberately mean for a whole home library: beyond that number the second half — one screen per book — becomes an evening's work, and evenings of work don't get finished. If you have far more, do it in two goes.
Second act: one book per screen
Once the scanning is over, every book you read has become a draft: it exists, but nobody can see it except you. Now you go through them.
Each screen holds one book. Title and author arrive already filled in from the catalogue when the barcode is known; when it isn't, the card is empty and you write it yourself. Then there are the categories — between one and five, and they are what makes the book findable by someone browsing a genre — the year, a cover and a description, if you feel like writing one.
At the bottom of the screen there are two buttons. Next saves and moves on. Skip, on the other hand, deletes that draft rather than setting it aside: use it when you realise you don't want to share that book after all, or that the barcode picked up the wrong volume. It is the only button on that screen that throws something away, and it is worth knowing that before pressing it.
Third act: publishing
At the end comes a summary with all the covers and two numbers: how many books are ready and how many you skipped. Drafts left with no title — the ones whose barcode wasn't in any catalogue — are listed separately, and they block publication until you complete them. That isn't fussiness: a book with no title is a book nobody searches for, and on a neighbourhood shelf it would be an empty line.
Then there is a single button: Publish all. It is what makes the books visible — in search, on the map, on the public pages. Until you press it nobody sees anything, and this is the part that surprises people most often: they reach the end, close the page satisfied, and the books stay sitting in draft.
On publication each copy is stamped with your area — the approximate one, never your address: how that works is explained in why your area is not your address. Which is why, if you haven't set where you are yet, the site asks for it before publishing: the drafts are left untouched and you pick up exactly where you were.
Stopping and picking it up again
A sequence can be left half-done — which is what happens to most people, because the first half is done standing in front of a shelf and the second sitting down. Coming back to it you find Resume, which returns you to where you stopped, and Discard, which deletes every draft from that round and starts again from nothing.
Only one sequence stays open at a time: two parallel lists of drafts are the surest way to publish the same book twice without noticing.
Photos
A cover isn't required, and for most books it arrives on its own from the catalogue. It is worth taking your own when your copy has something to say: an old edition, a cover different from the one found online, a book in a particular state.
The limit is eight megabytes per image, in JPEG, PNG or WebP. What you upload is re-encoded by us, and in that step the hidden data cameras bury in image files disappears — including GPS coordinates: the photo of your cover shouldn't tell anyone where it was taken.
On Android, from version 13, the camera button is separate from the gallery one. That isn't a quirk of ours: from that version, with a single button, the phone opens the picker for photos you have already taken and the camera is nowhere to be found.
Three tips from people who have actually done it
- Work in piles of ten. The whole shelf in one pass is the recipe for stopping halfway through the second act.
- Scan standing still, with the light in front of you. Laminated covers reflect: tilting the book slightly works better than moving the phone closer.
- Do the categories there and then. They are the one field that really changes whether anyone finds that book; going back to add them later, book by book, is something nobody does.