How to Export Your Goodreads Library (and Move It)

Export from Goodreads, step by step

The export lives on the Goodreads website, not in the mobile app. Use a computer, or open the full desktop site in your phone’s browser. Menus move from time to time; if a label below doesn’t match exactly, look for Import and export in your Goodreads account.

1. 1Sign in on the websiteGo to goodreads.com in a browser and sign in to your account.
2. 2Open My BooksClick “My Books” in the top navigation to see all your shelves.
3. 3Find Import and exportIn the left column, under “Tools”, click “Import and export”.
4. 4Click Export LibraryGoodreads starts building your file. For a large library this can take a few minutes.
5. 5Download the fileA link labelled with the date of your export appears below the button. Click it to download the CSV. If nothing appears, wait a moment and refresh the page.

If your books are on The StoryGraph

The StoryGraph has its own export, and it works the same way: a CSV you download from the website.

1. 1Open your accountSign in at thestorygraph.com, open the menu from your profile picture and choose “Manage Account”.
2. 2Find your dataScroll to the section about your data and click “Export StoryGraph Library”.
3. 3Download the CSVWhen the file is ready, download it and keep it alongside your Goodreads export if you have one.

A StoryGraph export keeps every date you read a book, not only the last one, so rereads come across intact. It also includes tags, moods and pace, which most other apps simply ignore.

What the CSV contains

A CSV is a plain text table: one line per book, with columns separated by commas. Any spreadsheet app can open it, and so can most reading apps. The Goodreads file has one row for every book on any of your shelves, including the ones you only marked as want to read.

The columns that matter most when you move are Title, Author, ISBN13, My Rating, Date Read, Date Added, Bookshelves, Exclusive Shelf, My Review, Private Notes and Read Count. Together they hold the shape of your reading life: what you read, when, what you thought of it and how you organised it.

What isn’t in it

Highlights and notes from Kindle aren’t in the CSV. Goodreads can show your Kindle highlights, but they live with Amazon, and you have to collect them separately, for example from your Kindle notebook. Your progress updates, the comments people left on your reviews, your friends and your groups aren’t in the file either. If any of them matter to you, save them before you close an account.

Common gotchas

Exclusive shelves

Every book sits on exactly one exclusive shelf: read, currently-reading or to-read, plus any exclusive shelves you created yourself, such as did-not-finish. That shelf becomes the book’s status in the new app. Your ordinary shelves, like favourites or book club, are listed together in the Bookshelves column, separated by commas, and usually arrive as tags or collections.

Missing and single dates

Many books have no Date Read at all, because they were marked as read without a date. Goodreads also exports only one date read per book, even if you read it three times; the Read Count column is the only trace of the rereads. Expect to fill in a few dates by hand if they matter to you.

Duplicate editions

If you shelved the paperback and later the ebook, you have two rows for one book. Some apps merge them by title and author, others import both. Look for doubles in the review step of the import, or in the spreadsheet before you start.

ISBN formatting

Goodreads writes ISBNs as ="9780141439549" so that spreadsheets keep them as text. Good importers strip that wrapping. The real danger comes from editing the file: open it in a spreadsheet, save it again, and ISBNs can lose their leading zeros or turn into numbers like 9.78E+12. Ebooks often have no ISBN at all, so the importer has to match them by title and author.

Keep a backup

Your export is a snapshot of years of reading, and it’s small: even thousands of books fit in a file of a few megabytes. Keep it somewhere you’ll still have in five years, such as a cloud drive, an email to yourself or a folder you back up anyway.

It’s worth exporting again once or twice a year even if you aren’t moving. Services change, accounts get locked, and a dated copy costs nothing. Keep the old ones too; a series of exports is a record in its own right.

Importing into a reading app

Most reading apps can read a Goodreads or StoryGraph CSV directly; look for Import in the app’s settings. A careful import does three things: it shows you what it found before it adds anything, it tells you which rows it couldn’t understand, and it lets you choose what happens to duplicates.

Before you import, check a few books you know well: one you reread, one with a long review, one on a shelf of your own. After the import, look them up and make sure the dates, rating and shelves arrived as you expected. If they did, the rest almost certainly did too.

Once your library has moved, keep tracking from where you left off. How to track your reading progress covers what’s worth writing down from now on.

Questions