Export List of my iPad Books?

[retexan599]

I have about 160 books on my iPad 10th generation. I would like to generate a list of (at least) the titles and export that list. If possible would include authors and possibly the cover thumbnail. Need to export to something that can later be shared with others (email, etc.). Do you think that can be done?

Thanks.

 

[giradman]

I have about 160 books on my iPad 10th generation. I would like to generate a list of (at least) the titles and export that list. If possible would include authors and possibly the cover thumbnail. Need to export to something that can later be shared with others (email, etc.). Do you think that can be done?

Thanks.

Hi John - I use two apps on my iPad for my books (and PDFs), i.e. Books & the Kindle apps - tell us where your books are located to direct our attention. Dave

 

[retexan599]

Hi John - I use two apps on my iPad for my books (and PDFs), i.e. Books & the Kindle apps - tell us where your books are located to direct our attention. Dave

Although I do have books in both the Kindle app and Books app, I was going to start with the books in the Books (old iBooks) app first.

 

[twerppoet]

I haven't looked at the Kindle app. You'll probably find it easier to go to the site and see what tools they have there that can list your books.

For Apple's Books app, you can use Shortcuts. If you don't have the Shortcuts app, you'll need to download it from the App Store. It's free.

I did a little experimenting and came up with the following shortcut.

Shortcuts

It saves a list of titles and authors to a note, then opens the note for you. You can tweak it in the text step to add more information, and do some basic formating. I have over 500 books, and it took a couple of minutes to run on my M2 iPad Pro. So, this s pretty slow for very large collections.

Also, I can't guarantee all books are in the lists. I added a number to the list, so you have a rough idea if they are all there, but the order is a bit different than what you get in library view in Books, so it's hard to be sure. The numbers in my Library Lists view don't match. The list is longer. I think that's because series are counted once in that view.

Good luck.

 

[retexan599]

Hey twerppoet, that is a great suggestion! That got me started very well. I made a nice list on the first try. Have more books than I thought. Very helpful, thanks so much! Will see what I can do with it from here.

 

[twerppoet]

No problem. Glad to help.

Hint: if you edit the text tool so that whatever info you add is separated by commas, you can copy the text too a .txt document, change the extention to .csv, and import it into a sphreadsheet.

I've used this trick to put Health data into spreadsheets in the past.