Moving Your Library Off Goodreads: What Comes Across and What Doesn't

Getting your data out of Goodreads is the easy part. It's a couple of clicks, and we've written a step-by-step guide to exporting if you need it.

Moving it somewhere else is where people come unstuck. Most of your library comes across cleanly, but a few things don't, and some of them you'd only notice months later - like a reread that's lost its dates, or a pile of books you gave up on that now say "Read".

Here's what to expect, whichever app you're moving to, and what to check before you go.

What comes across cleanly

Almost every book tracker that accepts a Goodreads file will bring across:

Your books - title, author, ISBN, and usually page count, publisher and year
Your ratings - Goodreads only does whole stars, so there's nothing to round
Your reviews - the text you wrote, though not the likes or comments on them
Your status - read, currently reading or want to read
The date you finished - for books you've read
Your shelves - though how well depends on the app (more on that below)

For most people, that's the bulk of what matters.

What doesn't (and why)

Some of these are gaps in Goodreads' export file, so no app can recover them. Others depend on where you're going.

Start dates. The export has no "date started" column at all - only the date you finished. If you tracked when you started books, that information stays behind. A new app will either leave start dates empty or fill in something else, such as the date you added the book.

Older reread dates. Goodreads records how many times you've read a book, but the export holds only one finish date - the most recent. Read something three times and you'll arrive with three reads and one date.

Did Not Finish. Goodreads added its own Did Not Finish shelf in March 2026 and moved most readers' DNF shelves onto it, so in a recent export those books are marked as DNF. But an app written before then may not know that shelf, and DNF books kept on an ordinary shelf - "abandoned", "gave-up" and the like - are just books on a shelf to the export. Either way, an app that doesn't recognise them will import them as something else: often "Read", or not started at all.

Progress updates. "Page 142 of 380" and the like aren't in the export. Books you're currently reading arrive as "currently reading", with no record of where you'd got to.

Audiobooks. The export has no listening time. Worse, the page count it gives for an audiobook usually belongs to the print edition, so an app that imports it as-is ends up with a twelve-hour listen that claims to be 320 pages.

Covers. The export is text only. Your new app has to find covers itself, and they may not match your exact edition.

Everything social. Friends, followers, groups, reading challenges, and the Goodreads community average. None of it is in the file.

Shelves: the bit worth checking

Goodreads has two kinds of shelf, and a good import treats them differently.

The three built-in shelves - read, currently-reading and to-read - are really a status. A book is on exactly one of them.
Your custom shelves - "favourites", "book club", "sci-fi" - are collections. A book can be on as many as you like.

A careful import turns the first kind into a reading status and the second into lists or tags. A careless one treats them all the same, and you end up with a list called "read" containing half your library, or your custom shelves flattened into one pile.

Before you commit to an app, it's worth checking:

Does it turn the built-in shelves into a status?
Does it keep custom shelves as separate lists or tags?
Does it recognise Goodreads' Did Not Finish shelf, and let you say which of your own shelves mean DNF?
Does it handle rereads, even without their earlier dates?
Does it spot duplicates, if you've already added some books by hand?
Can you get your data out again later? You're leaving one app partly because your data is stuck in it. Don't swap one locked box for another.

Before you leave Goodreads

A few things that make the move smoother:

Tidy your shelves first. Renaming or merging a shelf on Goodreads takes seconds. Doing it to a hundred books after the move takes longer.
Put your DNFs on Goodreads' own Did Not Finish shelf if they're still on a shelf you made, or scattered across several. That's the one an import is most likely to understand.
Note any start dates you care about. If they matter to you, this is your only chance to write them down.
Keep the CSV file. Even after you've moved, it's a backup of your reading history as it was.
Don't delete your account straight away. Keep it for a few weeks until you're happy everything arrived. There's no rush.

Moving to Book Assembly

If you're coming here, this is what happens. Go to Dashboard, then Data, then Import, and choose Goodreads. The import walks you through it:

Upload your file, then pick which books to bring across. You can filter by status or shelf, and untick anything you'd rather leave behind.
Map your shelves. Each custom shelf can become a new list, be added to a list you already have, or be skipped. Your to-read shelf becomes a TBR list by default, and you can rename or skip it.
Match authors, so "J.R.R. Tolkien" and "J. R. R. Tolkien" don't end up as two different people in your library.
Import. It runs in the background, skips books you already have, and looks up covers.

On the gaps above:

Did Not Finish: books on Goodreads' own Did Not Finish shelf come across as Did Not Finish. Shelves you made that look like DNF or paused get a tick box: obvious names like "dnf" or "on-hold" start ticked, and looser ones like "abandoned" or "later" are left for you to tick. Every book on a ticked shelf gets that status. Paused is its own status here, for books you mean to come back to.
Rereads: each read comes across as its own entry, with the finish date on the most recent. You can add older dates later if you know them. A book you're reading again keeps its earlier finish, so it still counts for that year.
Audiobooks: the misleading print page count is dropped, so you can add the listening time instead.
Private notes: come across with the book.
Missing details: Library Health can look up missing page counts, publishers and publication years afterwards, and lets you choose what to keep.

There's a step-by-step guide in our help pages that goes through each step of the import in more detail.

In Short

Most of your Goodreads library moves easily: books, ratings, reviews, shelves and finish dates. What gets lost is mostly what was never in the export - start dates, older reread dates and progress updates. The one thing that's easy to get wrong is DNF, so check how your new app handles that shelf before you commit.

Export, tidy your shelves, check the new app's shelf handling, and keep the file. Then take your time.

Questions about moving your library? Get in touch or join us at r/BookAssembly.