Your reading is yours.

Without an account

Your shelves, favourites and reading taste are saved in your browser, on your device, and nowhere else. To suggest books, the parts of your taste that matter (chosen categories, favourites, and each saved book’s shelf) are sent to Bookspine’s catalogue service, used to pick books, and not stored. A search with “Search more books” is sent to Open Library.

With an account

Signing in is optional, and done with Google. Bookspine then keeps:

• Your name, email address and picture link, as your Google account gives them, and Google’s ID for your account, which is how you’re recognised next time.
• Your library: shelves, favourites and taste, and when it was last saved, so it follows you to every device you sign in on.
• For each device you’re signed in on: when it signed in and was last active, and a name for it made from your browser’s description of itself (such as “Chrome on macOS”), so you can tell your devices apart and sign them out. Not the full description, and not where you were.

Bookspine never gets your Google password, and doesn’t keep the access Google grants at sign-in, so it can’t read anything else in your Google account. To stop abuse, requests to sign in, sign out and close an account are counted by network address over ten minutes; the counts are deleted once they are an hour old, the next time anyone signs in.

Cookies

Only to keep you signed in: a session cookie that lasts 30 days and renews as you use Bookspine, and one that guards each sign-in while you’re away at Google. Without an account there are none.

Where it lives

Bookspine runs on Cloudflare, which serves every page and stores the account database. Like any web host, Cloudflare logs a sample of requests for a few days to keep the site running. Google confirms who you are when you sign in, and never sees your library.

Book covers load straight from Open Library, part of the nonprofit Internet Archive. Your browser asks it for each cover, so it sees your IP address and that you came from Bookspine, as any site you visit would, but not which page you were on.

Describing a book

When you describe the book you want, your words go to Cloudflare’s AI service, which turns them into numbers that can be matched to books; Cloudflare says it doesn’t use what it’s sent to train its models. The books found for a description are kept in Cloudflare’s cache for a day, so the same description loads faster next time. None of it is linked to you or your account.

Bookshops and sponsored books

Book pages link to bookshops and libraries where you can get a copy. Bookspine doesn’t record those clicks; on a shop’s own site, its privacy policy and cookies apply. Where a link carries Bookspine’s affiliate ID, buying through it may pay Bookspine a small commission at no cost to you, and the page says so.

A book marked Sponsored at the top of Discover is a paid place, chosen by date. It never changes your recommendations or anyone’s ranking.

Taking it with you, or deleting it

On your account page you can download everything the account database keeps about you as a file (your account, its Google link, your devices and your library), sign any device out, and close your account. Closing it deletes your account, your library and every session at once. Cloudflare keeps a restorable history of the database for up to 30 days, after which nothing remains. Without an account, clear your shelves from Preferences or your browser’s settings.

Questions

Ask 3Level through threelevel.in. If this page changes, the change is made here first.