Book Tracker reads Book Crawler’s CSV export directly. The one thing to watch is what happens to the file between the two apps: open it in a spreadsheet and the ISBNs can be ruined.
Export your Book Crawler library
- Open Book Crawler and go to Settings → Import/Export.
- Choose to export as CSV.
- Send the file to yourself by Email, or save it to Dropbox.
- Save the attachment to Files or iCloud Drive on the device where you use Book Tracker.
If the exported file is empty, Book Crawler couldn’t write some characters in your library with its current encoding. Go to Settings, change CSV Encoding (the default is 8-bit ISO Latin) to a Unicode option, and export again. Book Tracker reads either encoding.
Don’t open the file in Excel or Numbers
Spreadsheet apps treat an ISBN as a number and save it in a short form like 9.78075E+12. The digits that are lost can’t be recovered. Import the file exactly as Book Crawler wrote it.
If your file has already been through a spreadsheet, the import still works. Those books come in without an ISBN, and the review screen flags every line where that happened, so you can fix them afterwards.
Import the file into Book Tracker
- Open Book Tracker and go to Settings → Import.
- Tap Choose File and select the Book Crawler file.
- Under Exported from, Book Tracker shows Book Crawler. If it shows a different app, tap it and pick Book Crawler.
- Tap Continue. Book Tracker looks up your books and finds their covers. When it’s done, tap Review.
- Review the list. Each row says what will happen to that book; tap a row to leave it out.
- Tap the Import button, which shows how many books are coming in (for example, Import 312 books). Book Tracker backs up your library before it adds anything.
What comes across
- The book: title, subtitle, authors, ISBN, pages, publisher, copyright date, link.
- Format, including library-style abbreviations like pbk. and hbk.
- Series and volume number.
- Genres as categories, kept whole: Fiction / Mystery & Detective stays one category.
- Tags and collections, both as tags.
- Read books, with the finish date when Book Crawler has one.
- Score as your rating, converted to the rating scale you use in Book Tracker.
- Comments as a note, and price as the purchase price, in your default currency.
Limits
- Book Crawler’s location column is the city where the book was published, not where you keep it. Book Tracker saves it as the place of publication.
- Book Crawler only says whether a book was read, so books you are reading or haven’t started arrive with no reading status.
- Loans are not imported.