Don't start over.

You built that one book at a time, over years, without ever thinking of it as data.

It's the summer you read nothing, and the winter you read eleven. The book you rated two stars and still think about. The record isn't complete — no record is — but it's yours, and it's the only copy of that particular decade there will ever be.

Wanting something different from here shouldn't cost you that.

A sample library, by year

Illustrative reader data — not a real RUNU account. 247 books across nine years.

Nine years fits in 118 kilobytes.

Open it

One row. A book, a verdict, a date.

Five fields, and a whole November in them. You read it in the dark half of that year.

It keeps going. Two hundred and forty-seven times, in the order you happened to finish them.

Sort by Date Read and the years fall out

That isn't a spreadsheet. That's where you were for nine years.

Row 1 · matched · added to your RUNU library

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

Finished · 26 Nov 2021 · ★★★★☆

No reading sessions — that November was never recorded anywhere.

The history was in there all along.

Comes across

Everything the export actually holds.

Title, Author

The book, matched against RUNU's catalogue.

ISBN, ISBN13

Used to pick the edition you actually read, where RUNU has it.

Exclusive Shelf

Your status. read → Finished, currently-reading → Reading, to-read → Want to read.

Bookshelves

Your own shelves. You decide where each one lands before anything is imported.

My Rating

Your rating, in whole stars, exactly as you gave it. No half stars invented.

My Review

Your review text, kept as yours. A later import never overwrites one you've edited in RUNU.

Date Read

The date you finished — at whatever precision Goodreads kept: a day, a month, or just a year. RUNU stores which, rather than pretending to a day it doesn't know.

Doesn't come across

Not withheld. Never recorded.

These are the things RUNU records while you read. No export can carry them, because nothing wrote them down at the time — so RUNU leaves them empty rather than filling them with a guess.

• Reading sessions — every sitting, and how long it lasted
• Recorded time, pages per sitting and reading pace
• Session Mood and Reading Rhythm
• Margins — the thoughts you'd have left beside a page
• The day you started a book — a Goodreads export has no start date at all

Goodreads' Date Added is kept with the import record for reference, and is never shown as the day you started reading. An imported book does not gain sessions it never had.

How your history comes over

Three minutes, and it's yours again.

1. 01 Ask Goodreads for your library On the Goodreads website: My Books → Import and export → Export Library. Goodreads prepares the file and offers it as a download.
2. 02 Keep the file it gives you It arrives as goodreads_library_export.csv. Don't open and re-save it — hand it to RUNU as it came.
3. 03 Hand it to RUNU RUNU asks for it when you first sign in, and it's always waiting under Profile → Import your library if you'd rather do it later.

The imported years stay exactly as they were. The record only gets deeper from the first time you press start — which is where the reading timer, your statistics and the Reading Journey begin.