How to export your Goodreads library

What the Goodreads CSV contains

Each row is one book. The columns worth knowing about are Title, Author, ISBN and ISBN13, My Rating, Average Rating, Number of Pages, Date Read, Date Added, Bookshelves, Exclusive Shelf (read, currently-reading or to-read), My Review and Read Count.

That covers the things readers care about most: what you read, when you read it, what you thought and which shelf it sat on. Ratings come across as numbers, so a three-star book stays a three-star book.

What does not come across

The export is a snapshot of your library, not of your whole account. Your friends, followers, group memberships, comments and likes are not in it, and neither are your reading challenge records as such, though the dates let another app rebuild your yearly counts.

Two limits catch people out. First, the CSV records one Date Read per row even when Read Count is higher, so multiple rereads of the same book collapse into a single date. Second, the ISBN fields are sometimes blank, particularly for older entries, ebooks and audiobooks. Importers match on ISBN first and fall back to title and author, so blank ISBNs are the rows most likely to need a manual fix.

Exporting changes nothing on Goodreads. No shelves move, nothing is deleted, and your account carries on exactly as before. It is safe to do purely as a backup.

Import the CSV into your new tracker

Most reading trackers accept the Goodreads CSV directly, because it has become the de facto interchange format. tome. reads it and rebuilds your shelves: read books land on Read with their dates and ratings, currently-reading books keep their place, and to-read becomes your TBR.

After any import, spot-check three things: the total book count against Goodreads, a handful of rows that had no ISBN, and anything with an unusual edition. Fixing five mismatches by hand is a normal outcome and takes a couple of minutes.

Do this before you need it

The reason to export today is not that you are leaving. Goodreads has changed hands, changed features and lost data before, and a fifteen-year reading history that exists in exactly one company's database is a single point of failure.

Run the export once or twice a year and keep the CSVs. They are small, they open in any spreadsheet app, and they will still be readable long after any particular app stops being maintained.