This script converts your Goodreads data export (data.csv) into Markdown files suitable for personal note-taking systems and integration with static site generators like Hugo.

It's how I migrated from Goodreads to gianluca.ai/books.

Note: I knew how to do this, but it's mundane gruntwork. I just wrote a basic spec and then had OpenAI's o1-preview generate the script. A few rounds of tweaking and it was doing what I wanted. It also wrote large chunks of this README in a similar way. I consider this kind of hacky once-off scripting an ideal use case for LLM code generation.

Export your Goodreads books from https://www.goodreads.com/review/import/. Name the resulting file data.csv

• Input: data.csv (Goodreads data export)
• Outputs:
  • reviews.md: Contains books you've read, rated, and/or reviewed.
  • list.md: Contains books you've shelved as wanting to read but haven't read yet.

Both output files are sorted chronologically, with the most recent additions or modifications at the top.

• No External Dependencies: The script uses only Python's standard libraries.
• Date Parsing: Handles various date formats and uses Date Read or Date Added for sorting.
• HTML to Markdown Conversion: Converts basic HTML in reviews to Markdown for better compatibility with Markdown processors like Hugo.
• Customizable Output: Easily modify the script to adjust formatting or add additional fields.

• Python 3.x installed on your system.

• Log in to Goodreads and navigate to Export Library.
• Click on Export Library to download your data in CSV format.
• Save the downloaded file as data.csv in the project directory.

Ensure your project directory has the following structure:

.
├── data.csv
├── script.py

Place the provided script.py file in the same directory as your data.csv.

Open a terminal window, navigate to your project directory, and execute:

python script.py

After running the script, you should see two new files in your directory:

• reviews.md
• list.md

• Grouping: Books are grouped by year using level 2 headings (##), based on the Date Read field. If Date Read is unavailable, Date Added is used.

• Book Entries: Each book is listed under its respective year with detailed information.

• Formatting:

  ## 2024
  
  ### Book Title (Original Publication Year)
  
  Author Name
  
  - Completed: YYYY-MM-DD
  - My Rating: /5  
  
  Review text in Markdown format.
  
  ---

• Reviews: Any HTML content in your reviews is converted to Markdown for better readability and compatibility.

• To-Read List: A simple markdown list of books you want to read.

• Formatting:

  - [[YYYY-MM-DD]] Book Title (Year Published) - Author Name

Feel free to modify script.py to adjust the formatting or include additional data fields from the CSV.

The script supports multiple date formats. If your dates are in a different format, you can update the date_formats tuple in the parse_date function.

date_formats = ("%Y/%m/%d", "%Y-%m-%d", "%m/%d/%Y", "%d/%m/%Y", "%B %d, %Y")