Like many people, I enjoy tracking my reading history and my thoughts on those books. For years, I've turned to Goodreads to do just that. It served as a centralized platform where I could compare my reading lists with friends', discover new titles I might be interested in, etc. But as more and more people leave Goodreads for other platforms like Fable or StoryGraph, I find my use of the social aspect dwindling.

So, like everything else in my life lately, I decided to move it all into Obsidian. The new Bases function makes it easy to create a database of my notes, and paired with a couple of additional plugins, I've brought my entire reading history — and all of my notes on those books — into a single place. That said, I still plan to use Goodreads; anything I read on Kindle Unlimited is automatically recorded there along with my rating of the book, but there's an Obsidian plugin that makes it easy to import updates to my reading list.

Booksidian made it easy to import my Goodreads history

Hundreds of notes with one click

Booksidian is a community plugin that links to your Goodreads account. No logging in is required, either; all it needs is the base RSS feed to your account, and then all shelves you have made public are available to it. I designated a specific folder in my Obsidian vault as the destination for notes, and another to contain the cover downloads. I then selected what data I wanted placed inside the note itself, opting for a description, the author name, and the title. I also selected frontmatter to include in each note. The process didn't take long at all, and the only hangup is that it syncs only the first 100 entries of a shelf to Obsidian. I had to go into my Goodreads account and move some titles around to make sure everything was ported over.

There are multiple options to automatically sync Booksidian to my vault, but I opted to do it manually for all future syncs. Mistakes aren't a problem, either; I can choose to overwrite my existing notes with updated Goodreads information, although this is irreversible. Once I've done this, anything that was overwritten is lost — that's why I made sure to get things set up the way I wanted in the long run before I started adjusting the notes themselves inside Obsidian.

I repeated the process for my "Read" and "Want to Read" folders. All I had to do was change the target folder in Obsidian, and change the Goodreads shelf I wanted to sync from. By performing manual syncs, I ensured it only pulled in and created the notes I wanted.

After that, I created two bases to sort everything

One for what I've read, one for what I want to read

Obsidian's Bases feature is still relatively new, and while it has been available to all users for about a month, it still has a ways to go. There are only two views currently available (table and card), although the development team promises that more are coming. For my purposes, I selected the Card view and selected the "Cover" property as the source of the image. Since that trait had been pulled over with all of the Goodreads entries, it automatically populated and filled the cards. I created specific filters for each of the Bases so that each one displayed entries from its corresponding folder, and then I added an author property so I could see them at a glance.

After that, I adjusted the card size until it displayed ten items per row. "Card size" changes the actual size of the card in the base, while "Image aspect ratio" adjusts how much of the image is displayed inside the card. It can be tricky to get every cover to display the same way, especially if the images are different sizes, but a bit of tweaking will go a long way. I adjusted the size until the majority of the cover was visible, even if that meant slightly cutting off the outside edges.

It's not restricted solely to Goodreads

That's just the most supported platform

I only read books in print or on Kindle (with the occasional PDF for out-of-print titles), but readers who use Kobo and other platforms can also do this. There are community plug-ins like Calibre, which make it possible to access your Calibre library directly in Obsidian, and others like Kobo Highlights Importer and Readwise that allow you to pull in highlighted snippets. If you use a ReMarkable tablet, you can import highlights with the Scrybble plugin. It's not the same as bringing in all of the book data, though.

If you want to do something like that, a plug-in like MediaDB can bridge the gap. It's definitely more work than automatically porting your Goodreads history, but MediaDB creates notes for books, movies, games, and even Wikipedia articles in whatever folder you designate. I've used it to create a database of all the TV shows and movies I've seen — a sort of virtual record of content consumption over the years, though it's far from complete (mostly because I don't remember everything I've seen).

The downside? I lose the social aspect of Goodreads, and it's more work

This method requires more manual intervention

It's easy enough to set up automatic, periodic syncs with Goodreads for anything I've read on Kindle, but if I want to update my TBR list, I have to open Booksidian's settings and change the destination folder and shelf selection. Ensuring there are only 100 entries per shelf is also a pain. It's not a perfect system, but it's private. Since all of the information is stored in markdown files, I don't have to worry about losing access to my reading history like I do if Goodreads were to shut down. While I do miss commenting on friends' reading habits, that's something that could potentially be restored when Bases gain the ability to be published through Obsidian Publish or put into a digital garden. It's not available yet, but it's on the roadmap.

The privacy and control are worth the extra effort

It's not that much more work

The internet has changed a lot since its inception, and I've seen countless websites come and go over time. I have more peace of mind knowing this information is secure and stored on my own machine, rather than on a website that could disappear without warning. I can also adjust the appearance of my digital library to a much greater extent. Bases can be tweaked and changed through CSS, and that customization will only become more extensive as the feature develops.

Goodreads is nice, but not necessary

I read a lot, and I like knowing what I have and haven't read. Some books don't leave much of an impression at all, while others linger long after I've closed the last page. Being able to review my thoughts on a given book much later is sort of like discovering an old journal. Thanks to Obsidian, I can ensure those notes remain accessible for years to come.