As I continue to explore GoodReads with an eye to exiting that site, I am amazed at just how terrible it is. I exported my library, intending to delete everything that wasn’t read in the last five years, but the resulting CSV file is missing so much!
There is no “Date Read” for many books that are only present in the file because I read them, and a surprising number of books are missing ISBNs, too. I’m talking about books in print, not ebooks or audiobooks that might not even have ISBNs.
It is clear that Amazon does not prioritize accuracy in export files, and as I explain previously, they don’t prioritize accuracy in their own database either, although the effect is seen in different ways.
The long and short of it is that I’m apparently going to need to manually edit the CSV file in order to get anything like accurate data, and giving up the convenient GoodRead mobile app for a BookWyrm server seems more than ever like a fair trade. I’ll happily pitch a few bucks a month toward @bookrastinating for their help getting things set up, and to avoid propping up Amazon’s less-than-lackluster efforts with GoodReads.
This seems like a good way to spend a day off work, right?
The CSV spreadsheet is usually the one that’s a day ahead, so I guessed it was the one using GMT. Except… every now and then, it’s the one that’s a day behind. The inconsistency rules out GMT shenanigans, I think, but also, I don’t ever supply a time when marking a book as read. I select a year, month, and day. Which suggests it’s arbitrarily storing a time, and the fact that it’s off so often suggests it’s storing a time within five or six hours of midnight. And apparently inconsistently.
Another amusing bug anecdote is that books I finished reading on Oct 1, 2022, are just listed on the site as having been read “Oct 2022.” No date shown. The CSV spreadsheet has a date, of course.
It seems like there’s an entire class of date/time bugs on GoodReads, before we even get to the missing ISBNs and badly-corrupt data from 2017.
I’m not sure which is worse, exactly: GoodReads exporting my library with no “Date Read” filled in, despite having a “Date Read” on the site, or GoodReads exporting my library with the wrong “Date Read” filled in, one that is a day off from the one on the site.
How does that even happen? Given that it’s off by a day when it’s off, I’m guess it’s a time zone issue, with either the site or the export function using GMT and the other using my local time, six hours removed.
That doesn’t explain the many rows in which the date is just missing. Nor the missing ISBNs.
It’s been clear for a long time that Amazon doesn’t actually care about making GoodReads a GoodSite, but this is really, really bad.
What I’ve settled on doing is opening the export CSV in a spreadsheet in one pane, sorted by reverse “Date Added,” and looking at “My Books” on GoodReads in another pane, sorted the same way.
The Arc browser from https://arc.net/ is working pretty well for this.
#GoodReads #Amazon #nerdery #blog #Bookwyrm