Import from LibraryThing

If you've catalogued your books on LibraryThing and want to try Book Assembly, you can bring your library across. The import picks up your books, ratings, reviews, comments, tags, collections, genres, and reading history.

Getting your export file

On the LibraryThing website, open More > Import/Export and choose the JSON export (not the tab-delimited text option - JSON keeps your data clean and complete). Save the file, then upload it to Book Assembly, where a step-by-step wizard handles the rest.

What comes across

• Books, authors, and ISBN
• Star ratings, including half-stars
• Reviews, plus public and private comments (as notes)
• Reading status and dates, worked out from your collections
• Tags and custom collections, mapped to Book Assembly lists
• Genres, matched to your existing genres or created if new
• Ownership, format, page count, publisher, and publication year

What doesn't come across

Book Assembly is a reading tracker rather than a cataloguing system, so library-cataloguing detail - Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification, LCCN, OCLC numbers, physical dimensions, subjects, awards, and price - isn't imported. Series isn't imported yet (a planned addition; you can group books into series yourself afterwards), and cover images are looked up by ISBN rather than taken from the export.

The import wizard

The same friendly wizard used for Goodreads and StoryGraph works here. You choose which books to import, map your LibraryThing tags and collections to lists, and match author names for consistency. Once you confirm, the import runs in the background - you'll get an email when it's done. Cover images can be found automatically, or you can skip that and add them later.

Import limits

Each import handles up to 1,000 books. If your LibraryThing library is larger, you can import in batches - already-imported books are skipped automatically.

For a detailed walkthrough, see the full LibraryThing import guide.