How to move your Goodreads library to another app without losing anything

Most readers who want to leave Goodreads stay for one reason: years of reading are in there and moving them sounds like a weekend of copying. It is not. Goodreads lets you download your whole library as one file, and most other trackers can read that file.

Export your library from Goodreads

1. 1Open Goodreads on a computer, not the phone app, and go to My Books.
2. 2In the left sidebar under Tools, choose Import and export.
3. 3Click Export Library and wait. It can take a few minutes if you have thousands of books.
4. 4When the file is ready a link appears at the top of the page. Download the CSV.

Open the file in a spreadsheet before you import it anywhere. Glance at the rows for books you remember reading and check the dates and ratings are there. If the file looks right, the import will too.

What the export keeps, and what it does not

• Kept: titles, authors, ISBNs, your star rating, the shelves you used, dates read and added, page counts, and the text of your reviews.
• Often thin or missing: the exact start date of a book, re-reads, and anything you wrote in the app but not in a review.
• Never exported: covers. A new app fetches those itself.

Keep the original CSV somewhere safe even after you have moved. It is the only complete copy of your reading history that is entirely yours.

Import it, then tidy it

Upload the CSV in the new app. Afterwards, sort the list by date read and scan the first and last screen: if both ends look right, the middle usually does. Fix duplicates and books that landed on the wrong shelf now, while you still remember what the mistakes should look like.

Do not try to re-enter old half-star ratings or perfect every date. A long list that is mostly right is far more useful than a short one that is perfect.

Check before you delete anything

Leave your Goodreads account where it is for a few weeks. Use the new app for the books you read next, and only decide about the old account once you know the new setup suits you. There is no prize for deleting it quickly.