How to import your Goodreads library into Litmus

Leaving Goodreads does not mean leaving your reading history behind. Goodreads lets you export your entire library as a single file, and Litmus reads that file directly. Your books, ratings, reviews, shelves, and reading dates all come across. Here is the whole process, start to finish.

Step 1: Export your library from Goodreads

Goodreads keeps the export tool on the desktop site, so this step is easiest on a computer.

Sign in to Goodreads and open My Books.
In the left sidebar, under Tools, click Import and export.
Click Export Library. Goodreads takes a moment to build the file.
When the green Your export from (date) link appears, click it to download a file named something like goodreads_library_export.csv.

That single .csv file is your whole library: every book, the shelves you filed it under, your rating and review, and the dates you added and finished it.

Step 2: Open the import screen in Litmus

Open Litmus on the web or on your phone.
Go to Settings, then Import.
Choose Goodreads as the source.

Step 3: Drop in your file

Select the goodreads_library_export.csv file you downloaded. Litmus reads it on your device, book by book, and adds everything to your shelf. A large library of several hundred books takes only a few seconds.

What comes across

Litmus maps the Goodreads export onto its own shelf, keeping the parts that matter:

Title, author, and ISBN for every book.
Your star rating and your review text.
Your shelves. A “read” book lands as finished, “currently-reading” stays currently reading, and “to-read” becomes want to read. Books you marked as did-not-finish keep that status too, rather than being flattened into a single read-or-unread state.
Your dates, including when you finished a book, so your history and stats line up with reality.
Your own shelf names, such as “favorites” or “sci-fi”, carried over as tags so nothing you organized is lost.

What happens to representation tags

After an import, Litmus runs a quiet, automatic scan that looks for the representation signals already attached to your books, using public sources rather than guessing. It is deliberately conservative: it will leave a book untagged rather than assume anything about a person. The scan runs on its own, and it never overwrites a tag you set by hand. The result is that your spectrum view is populated soon after the import finishes, without any extra work from you.

A few tips

Export on a computer if you can. The Goodreads export tool is hard to reach on the mobile site.
If your phone does not seem to see the file, make sure you are selecting the .csv you downloaded and not a zipped version.
Coming from StoryGraph instead? The steps are the same: export your library from StoryGraph, then choose StoryGraph as the source in the Litmus import screen.

That is the whole migration. Your shelves, your ratings, your years of reading, all in one place, and now with a view of the range of what you read.