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.

 

[twerppoet]

I've done some research and experimenting, and have come up with a way to get a text list of your Amazon books. It isn't perfect, but it's a start; a readable, editable list anyway.

1) Go to read.amazon.com in Safari and sign in with your Amazon account
2) In the left column choose what you want to list. Books, most likely.
3) At the top right, choose your sort method.
4) At the top right, choose to view by Compact List
5) Keep scrolling to the bottom of the page until new books stop loading. If you don't, you won't get all of them.
6) Run the linked Shortcut using the Share Sheet. You'll have to allow it to access in the popup.

This will create an Amazon Book List in the Notes app, and open it for you.

The first several lines of text are chaff from the website. Select and delete them.

The file isn't perfect, as it has some extra separation, dots, tabs, or whatever between each entry. These can probably be removed with an extra Replace Text step and using Regular Expressions. I couldn't mange it after several minutes of tinkering, and gave up. Copying it into another text editor and using the Find and Replace might work as well.

Shortcuts

Good luck.