Kyle Carroll
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Desktop tool · Open source

BookStats

Feed it a LibraryThing export and it tells you what your reading year actually looked like.

What it is

I catalog my library in LibraryThing, which is great at holding data and less interested in telling you anything about it. BookStats reads the TSV export and answers the questions I actually had: how much of the shelf is unread, which authors I keep rating highly, what I finished this year versus what I only bought this year.

How it works

  • Export your catalog from LibraryThing as a tab-separated file.
  • Run the script against it. No account, no upload — it stays on your machine.
  • You get a breakdown by collection, rating, author, and year.

One gotcha worth knowing if you fork it: LibraryThing exports are Latin-1, not UTF-8, and the Collections field needs to be stripped before comparing — trailing whitespace quietly breaks the owned-versus-unread split.

Status

It does what I need, which means it's finished until I want something else from it. Open source — take it, break it, send a pull request.

../images/bookstats-1.png