You’ve joined Hardcover and want to import your library. If you use Goodreads or Storygraph, we provide importers for those formats in our Importer. These are available when you immediately sign up and are going through onboarding.
After you’ve completed onboarding, we also have a custom format that supports creating your own CSV file and uploading that one. Here’s a breakdown of the fields required for this file.
Side note: we don’t have the custom format available during onboarding because that’s supposed to be a real quick experience, and generating a CSV with the right columns and all of your data can take a little while. 😅
File format: CSV. Ex: yourfile.csv
Header columns: Required. Check out the list of columns below. Every column header is required to ensure you’re using the correct format and didn’t accidentally select a different CSV file.
Header titles are case sensitive.
Values can be quoted or not. If you’re using spaces, then that fields values should be quoted.
Here’s a sample version of this CSV from Google Sheets.
Columns headers:
| Column Title | Required? | Column Format | Example Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title | Yes | String | Mistborn: The Final Empire | The title should not contain the series. It should contain the full, official title of the book including any subtitle. |
| Author | Yes | Comma separated string with optional roles in parethesisᶜ | “Brandon Sanderson, Michael Kramer (Narrator)” | At least 1 author required |
| Series | No | Comma separated string with optional position in parethesisᶜ | The Mistborn Saga: The Original Trilogy (#1), The Cosmere, The Misborn Saga (#1) | Will only be used if Hardcover needs to create this book. |
| Status | Yes | One of: • None • Want to Read • Currently Reading • Read • Did Not Finish | Read | Case insensitive (read, Read, READ). None will not add this book to your library, but would still create tags and add it to lists. |
| Privacy | No | One of: • Public • Followers • Private | Public | Will use your account setting if empty, or not one of these three values. |
| Hardcover Book ID | Noᵃ | Hardcover ID of this book | 369692 | Will be ignored if Edition ID is set. |
| Hardcover Edition ID | Noᵃ | Hardcover ID of this edition | 11581193 | |
| ISBN 10 | Noᵃ | 10-character string | 9781427222 | Remove any dashes or Xs. |
| ISBN 13 | Noᵃ | 13-character string | 9781427222411 | Remove any dashes or Xs. |
| ASIN | Noᵃ | Amazon Unique Identifier | ||
| Media | No | One of: • Book • Ebook • Audiobook | Book | If provided, and unable to locate the edition by ISBN, a newly create editions will use this format. |
| Country Code | No | Two or three letter country code | us | Only used to create a new edition. Case insensitive. |
| Language Code | No | Two or Three letter language code. | en | Only used to create a new edition. Case insensitive. |
| Binding | No | String | Hardcover | A free text description of this editions format. Will be used if Hardcover creates a new edition. |
| Pages | No | Number | 351 | Leave blank for audiobooks |
| Duration in Seconds | No | Number | 86400 | Audiobook length in seconds. Leave blank for non-audiobooks. |
| Publish Date | Noᵇ | Date in format YYYY-MM-DD | 2009-06-09 | Required to create a new book in the system if no match is found. |
| Publisher | No | String | Macmillan Audio | Optional publisher name. |
| Genres | No | Comma separated stringᶜ | Fantasy, Adventure, Young Adult | |
| Moods | No | Comma separated stringᶜ | Adventure, Dark, Mysterious | |
| Tags | No | Comma separated stringᶜ | favorites, BookTok | |
| Content Warnings | No | Comma separated stringᶜ | Violence, | |
| Lists | No | Comma separated stringᶜ, with optional position¹ | Recommendations, Brandon Sanderon Books (#1) | The “#” is optional when setting position. |
| Date Added | No | Date in format YYYY-MM-DD | 2015-01-15 | Initial date you ever saved this book. Will set this to the import date if not given. |
| Date Started | No | Comma separated dates in format YYYY-MM-DD | 2015-01-15,2022-06-10 | Creates a “Date Read” for these start dates. The first one will correspond with the first end date from Date Finished. |
| Date Finished | No | Comma separated dates in format YYYY-MM-DD | 2015-01-22,2022-06-19 | |
| Rating | No | Number from 0.5 to 5 in incremdents of 0.5. | 4.5 | We’ll round to the closest 0.5 number if less in the range 0 to 5. |
| Review | No | String or Markdownᵈ | This book is **amazing**.\n\nThis is another paragraph | You can use line breaks for \n to indicate a single line break, \n\n to indicate a new paragraph. |
| Review Contains Spoilers | No | Boolean, one of: • Yes • No (Default) | No | |
| Sponsored Review | No | Boolean, one of: • Yes • No (Default) | No | Did you receive this book as an Advanced Review Copy (ARC), or any other compensation or benefit related to this book? |
| Review Date | No | Date in format YYYY-MM-DD | 2015-01-22 | Will default to the first “Date Finished”. |
| Review URL | No | URL string | https://adamfortuna.com/books/mistborn | If provided, we’ll set the Cannoical URL of your review to this URL |
| Review Media URL | No | URL string | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=something | If provided, we’ll link to this social media post in your review. |
| Private Notes | No | String | I heard about this book from Adam | Will create a private Journal Entry with this content. |
| Owned | No | Boolean, one of: • Yes • No (Default) | Yes | Will add to your Owned List |
| Compilation | No | Boolean, one of: • Yes • No (Default) | No | Yes indicates that this book is a collection of other books. |
ᵃ – Indicates that this option is required to set a specific edition.
ᵇ – Required to create a new book if not found in Hardcover
ᶜ – For all comma separated values, a space after the comma is optional. It’ll be removed.
ᵈ – Valid markdown include: list, bold, italic, quote, code. All other markdown will be stripped.
¹ – Lists on Hardcover can be unordered or ordered. If you include a number in parenthesis, we’ll set that as the position of this book in the list.
If you only want to include Date Finished but not date started, we’ll still create that and mark it as read as of that date.