Goodreads Alternatives: Importing
If you’ve been following me for a while (aka years) you’ll know I used to keep book journals before signing up to Goodreads - notebooks printed to keep track of books read, with areas for rating and notes. I even made a few of my own! I loved those things. To be real honest, when I created my Goodreads account I literally went through each page of multiple journals and manually added them to my account. It was A Lot, but I feel so lucky that I didn’t have to begin from nothing and was able to start with eight years of reading history.
Luckily, since then Goodreads has done all the work for me. All I had to do was export a CSV with all of my account information. Technology is amazing!
Here are some first impressions upon importing to the alternatives:
Book Hype:
Surprisingly fast! My import only took a few minutes. But also a lot was inaccurate in regards to editions (ex. even though my Goodreads info listed books as paperback/hardcover, they would often import as ebooks/audiobooks). Which I accept since this is a relatively new site. The database didn’t have 17/~1500 titles, which is still pretty impressive
For some books I had to settle for different editions because the ones I have aren’t in the database, but again, not a huge deal. I couldn’t find an obvious way to add books/editions, but the option could exist somewhere
Heads up: if a book is not marked as owned and is only on your owned-books shelf in Goodreads, it will not import as an owned book. It will instead only exist on an owned-books tag (shelves are converted to tags). I made this mistake and manually went through 30 pages of books to fix it. Sigh.
The biggest problem for me: owned/tagged books are listed in the most random order and there is no way to sort them
Also: books do not always show up with the cover you read, but with whatever the default cover is (which can be random as well)
The site seems really focused on bought books - for each book there is an option to input if a book was purchased/a gift/other and the date you acquired it. Your profile then lists the number of books you’ve acquired, and on the stats page there is a graph that shows this data over time. Before the past few years I used the library a lot, so there is no way to account for that (though I do have a tag for library books)
You can keep track of signed books and special editions, which is super cool (I even added a “signed” shelf to Goodreads because I like the idea so much)
You can “shelve” a book. I have no idea what this means and don’t know how to find out. You can mark a book as read/to read/dnf, so what is “shelved”?
The Storygraph:
It looks like my owned books imported as just the tag, because if I’m looking at a book I know I own it says “mark as owned”
It’s pretty interesting to see how the books I’ve read are classified in the stats
There’s no easy way to see all of your books at once unless you’ve tagged them all (which I have, thankfully). You have to go to your tags > view all > tagged books, so there isn’t a direct way to get there from your profile. For now you can’t see tags on the profiles of people you follow, but that’s coming in the future
Your book lists show each one in a “line” format with some of the details, one after another. I miss having a larger overview that a grid view provides
So many sorting/filter options! I love it
The book descriptions only list the publishing year. I like to have the exact date so I can keep up with new releases, but that isn’t a huge deal