Play Book Tag discussion

On top of being sick (this new strain of COVID is rough. Up and down, up and down but slowly feeling better) I downloaded my Goodreads library and uploaded to AI to help shelve. This is not fool proof, but I wanted a start as I haven't been shelving anything. I knew I would have to run it through several times and specify clarifications and clean up. At the same time, I was practicing uploading edits to my library. In the course of this, probably because I was also sick, I deleted my whole library. Talk about depressed. The upload feature of Goodreads is terrible. You can't download your library, make some edits, and then reupload. No....it has to be formatted and displayed completely different with no real guidelines on the standards. So, at this point, I scrap the AI shelving and start adding books manually. It will take years.... furthering this feeling of futility.

But, I'm not a quitter and this is really important to me. I buckle down and decided I'm going to solve the Goodreads upload mystery. I email Goodreads. They are no help. No help at all. So then its trial and error. I get books to upload but not the reviews. I finally solve the reviews to notice all the dates are wrong. On and on and on. You can't upload extremely large batches to I break them down in 50. Some batches freeze without explination. (some titles are flagged and cannot be uploaded like Mein Kampf and There Are Dads Way Worse Than You: Unimpeachable Evidence of Your Excellence as a Father. Yeah, explain that second one. They have to be manually added, but if they are in your batch, the whole batch freezes. All this is taking trial and error.

Lastly, if you don't have the ISBN-10 for a book, it won't upload. When you download your library, many ISBN-10 are missing. ISBN-13 may or mostly likely, won't work. So I used AI to track down all the ISBN-10 I was missing. (digital only books will not upload because they don't have an ISBN) Even then, some will not upload.

At the end, I still had 80 books I had to add manually. It seems a few dates are still wrong, though most of them are correct or close to correct. The year is correct. Some of my reviews are now in quotations and I've lost all the comments and likes on my reviews. But I was able to get them all loaded. It took hours. Best estimate, a total of 16-17 hours. BUT I'M BACK BABY!!! YIPPIE KI-YAY! and everything else that fits.

Just wanted to share and let everyone know, I can help with mass uploads. It won't be perfect, but it will be good.

Wow, what a journey, Jason! What a JOB!

I periodically export my books to Storygraph - which is the only thing I use it for - as a sort of backup. Of course, I don't then troubleshoot what on Storygraph - just don't have time and I've made mental peace with having bad records perhpas. After all, I lived and read until 2018 without any sort of lists, reviews, tracking.

I'm on Storygraph because the leader of my IRL Feminerdy Book Club uses it over GR for our library etc. She tends to hop on the bandwagon of the latest book tracking social media sites as they get traction, so the group has pages all over the place with only 2 locations really active - Discord for our virtual meetings and voting on polls and Storygraph. The other sites still exist - GR, FB for example, but are not really active - though we keep info up on books being read. Anyway, aside from that it is an easy export to use for back up. I find.

I had the backup file. The issue was Goodreads upload. Its terrible. You download your information in a way that Goodreads will not allow it to upload

Sorry to hear you had to go through all that rigamarole. How frustrating! I will say it is fairly easy to export a GR file and import it to LibraryThing as a backup. I know this isn't what you were after in this particular effort. I just mention it in case it is helpful. There are still issues, such as covers not coming over, but the reviews and ratings, and the books upload accurately.

I don't get the impression the GR really cares all that much about how we use the site. It is all about sales to Amazon, their parent company. Big surprise, I know.

Hope you get to feeling better soon.

Wow, I hope you feel better soon. That’s a lot of work!

I haven’t backed up my Goodreads library in years, not since I stopped using my laptop.

Has anyone ever lost their library other than while exporting it? I feel confident doing anything within gr, but my other skills are so rusty, I feel like it’s safer to not try anything new.

Is it possible to copy your library and import it into a different gr account as a backup?

Joy D wrote: "Sorry to hear you had to go through all that rigamarole. How frustrating! I will say it is fairly easy to export a GR file and import it to LibraryThing as a backup. I know this isn't what you were..."

Another plug for LibraryThing.

If you keep your tbr over there, you can do a "tagmash" to combine tag searches. Use your initials on all your tbr books and tagmash your initials with the tag of the month and voila! All the books on your tbr with that tag (at least if that tag is also used by someone at LT). There are not as many people on LT, so you might not get as many "hits" as here, but here, there is no way to do a tagmash, so...

NancyJ wrote: "Is it possible to copy your library and import it into a different gr account as a backup?i..."

Yes, it's possible, however it's not that easy. You can't export and then turn around and import. Or at least I couldn't. I had to edit columns. HTML characters had to be removed from all the reviews. When you export, any line break in a review is denoted with "

", along with symbols for apostrophes and other characters. All of these had to be removed. I learned how to make excel find and edit all of them at one time.

That is just one example of the many trial and error things I found. Huge oversight in Goodreads but as Joy said, Goodreads don't care. However, a little bit of investment in the site seems like a larger return. But what do I know.

Wow, that is an ordeal. But it really mattered to you and that speaks to something. It was a job that was a labor of if not love something like importance and care.