From Goodreads to Zotero scripts
Hello people.
I was starting the new year with the intention of getting disconnected from a bunch of data scraping big corporations. One of them I use is GoodReads (owned by Amazon I believe). I used it a lot, but I want to move to something more personal and local to my computer. This also makes it possible to delete my GoodReads profile.
You know when you are not paying, you are actually the product.
Anyway, it was a bit of a hassle to get my reading list into Zotero. I actually needed to to a bit of programming. I created some (arguably pretty ugly) python scripts that transforms a GoodReads export in two steps into something Zotero can ingest. I made it for my use case so if you want to use it you probably want to change some of the code to make it fit your particular method.
Maybe it is useful to someone from this group. Please find the files here and let me know if you have some suggestions or questions.
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
I don't pay for Zotero. It has many ways to export your collection in popular formats so you can use it with other software as well. This collection is not complete, though and some tags and attachments get lost. I haven't figured out yet what is missing and why, but moving from Zotero is a lot easier than moving from Goodreads.
my first Zettel uid: 202008120915
I recently discovered this site (black woman owned) which does the same as Goodreads (in case this is of interest)https://www.thestorygraph.com/
Looks really good. Thanks for the suggestion.