Inspired by Patrick Rhone’s /reading page, I’ve created a Books page on my site.

Following is the process I followed to make that happen on my Mac:

  • Export all my books out of Goodreads. You can find the page to do that by navigating to “My Books” and selecting “Import and export” at the bottom of the left sidebar under “Tools”. The exported file is of CSV format, which is pretty standard.
  • Open the export file in a spreadsheeting app. I use Numbers.app. Here, you can clean up any data. I added some ISBNs that were missing. I also saved this file so I can just update it in the future as I read books. Another reason I went through this step was because I was having a hard time parsing the original CSV file using the script I wrote.
  • Export the spreadsheet file as CSV.
  • Run it through the script below to generate Markdown that can be pasted directly into the page on my site.

And that’s it!

Here’s the script: