To export your reading list from most reading sites, open your account settings, find the section called Data or Privacy, and choose Export. You will usually be offered a CSV file, which opens in any spreadsheet program, and sometimes a JSON file for people who enjoy that. The site will prepare the file and send you a link, which can take a few minutes. Download it, open it, and check that your titles, ratings, and dates read all came through. If a column looks empty, it was probably empty in your account too.
That is the useful part. The rest of this page is a diary entry, because I am a horse, and I have been told that horses keep diaries. I do not know who told me. It was said near the hay.
5:40 a.m. Woke up. Typed my name. It took eleven minutes because I keep hitting the whole row of keys at once with my hoof. The screen now says "hhhhhhhhhhhhhh". That is close enough to Horse.
6:15 a.m. A visitor at the stall door. She wants to export her reading list. She said it very clearly and held her phone up to my face, which I appreciated, because I cannot see anything held more than a foot away. I told her I would look into it. I do not know how to look into things. I looked at the phone for a while and then at her coat, which had a button on it I wanted to taste.
6:40 a.m. Hay. I will not discuss it.
7:30 a.m. Tried to find the Export button. There is a door that says Settings. It is the barn door. I pushed it with my nose and it opened onto the paddock, so that is my settings. You can see the lake from there, a long gray strip past the fence, and I stood in my settings and looked at it for what the clock says was forty minutes. I think it was the right thing to do. Nobody has ever exported anything while standing in front of a lake and I feel I am the first.
8:25 a.m. Back inside. Eleven more visitors have arrived asking for the same thing. Some want a CSV. One wants a "full archive of my activity". I explained that the only activity here is me, and the archive is a stall. I offered to let her look. She did not look. People are often shy around stalls.
9:50 a.m. I want to be accurate about what exporting is, in case someone from the office reads this. As far as I can tell, exporting is when your things leave one place and arrive in another place, still the same things. Everyone who comes here has a pile of books they have read, and they want the pile to be portable. This is a reasonable thing to want. I want it also. I would like my hay to be portable, to the paddock, and also to the lake.
11:05 a.m. Trying again to make a file. I stepped on a key and made a document. It has one word in it, and the word is "oats". I am exporting it to you now by placing it where you can see it. Check your downloads. If it is not there, it is in my heart, which is also not a CSV, but it is warm.
12:30 p.m. Lunch. Hay again, but better hay. Someone left a note by the water trough that says RANDY WAS HERE and something I could not read, because I cannot read, because I am a horse. Randy never forgets a name, but he does forget to close the gate.
2:15 p.m. A quiet visitor came by. She did not ask about exporting. She asked if I had read anything good lately. I said I had read the same bale for three years and it was getting better each time. She laughed, and wrote something down, and I realized this was the closest thing to an export that has happened all day: one reader giving another reader a book she had enjoyed. It cost nothing and it went straight from her to me. I recommend it over any file.
4:00 p.m. More hay. Then the lake again, going orange. I gave the lake my reading list, out loud, in a series of snorts. It is the longest list I have. It is mostly books about weather and one about a horse who was brave. The lake took all of it without a single error message.
If you came to export your reading list and found a horse, I am sorry. I do not have a button. I have a mane, and you are welcome to hold it. If you want to count your own books, you can try the page about reading stats, where a number is doing its best, or the one about your to-be-read pile, which is the part you actually keep.
Authors are fragile organisms, and they would like to be exported from your shelf into your hands, so please buy a book. Carry it home yourself. I would offer, but I do not have pockets, and I still have the lake to look at.
Sleepily,
Booktrovert #4700