On October 28, I posted a few books which did not have ISBN's and took advantage of the new (new to me anyway - the last time I posted books I don't remember it being on the page) feature of uploading photos at the time I listed the books.  I thought it was cool to have the option of doing that at the same time as listing.  It has been 10 days and the covers never showed up.

I just now uploaded them again....and did not get the message that they are pending in the system...it is as if they were never uploaded.  So, my question is, why have the option to upload the covers at the time of posting if that option does not work?...or does it usually work and just didn't for me?

Hi Peggy--

Actually that's a remnant of an old system.  Since it is built-in, it's probably not easy to delete.  The two ways of uploading photos are

1) for any cover (from the Help Center;)

• Find a cover image for the book on another Internet database, or scan one in or take a digital photograph
  • The image must be less than 5 MB
  • The image must be in .jpg format
  • The image must be cropped to show only the book cover
  • The image can't be one that has "See inside!" (some images from Amazon.com have this)
• Scroll down to the bottom of any page on the site
• Click "Upload Book Covers"
• Enter the ISBN for the book
• Browse your hard drive for the cover image
• Click to submit it
• The Image Approvers will usually approve images quickly.
  • If your image is not approved, it might have been too fuzzy or in the wrong format or not properly cropped
  • The Image Approvers will often replace your image with a better one when your submission comes in.

2) If the book has the generic blue "non" cover, click on the book title, click on the blue cover, and browse to upload your image.

Yes, it is a bug in the system that the upload cover link at the bottom of the Edit Book Data page is broken and doesn't work properly.  The only ways to safely upload an image is to click on the Upload Book Covers link at bottom of page, or to click on the blue book image you want to change and fill in the dialogue box that comes up.

The links included in the Edit Book Data section and in the posting a non-ISBN book do not work.

Do you know if there is a preferred way to name the jpg files?  ie. with the book's title, or simply the ISBN or.....?

I just posted a few books without art and thought I'd see how my digital camera and I could do.  (No scanner right now unfortunately.)

Rick it honestly doesn't matter what you name the files since we never see the file name just the cover image when approving.

Rick, I will also comment on your plan to use your camera. I've seen very few people that were not professional photographers take a photo of a book that could be used. Unless you know a lot about manipulation of images you'll likely have a skewed image that is out of shape, or have a glare from your flash. Those are the two most common problems people have with photographing their books for cover images.

Unless they are really rare books, there is about an 75% chance of finding an image on the Internet that is a good 500px tall image that merely needs cropped to be used here. Try Google & Google images using both the title & author or just the ISBN.

Thanks for the info and input.  Actually, I did take 4 photos and all 4 were used, so I guess it worked! 

Sherry - I did used to be a prof photog back in HS and college (in my Father's business), but I'm just using a simple digital camera, then cropping the image with Irfanview.  These weren't real glossy covers, so that did help.  I'll do some more from my shelf and see how it continues to work out.  I do agree that a camera is the hard way to go - a scanner would be easier and avoid the perspective and flash glare probs.