Booksidian

Booksidian

Booksidian brings your Goodreads data to Obsidian.

You can set both the body and the frontmatter for your book-note by choosing from the list of parameters available over the Goodreads RSS feed (+ some extra that can be deduced from them like subtitle or series).

Setup Instructions

Please note that the way Goodreads handles their RSS feed, only the first 100 items of a shelf are added to the respective RSS feed. So if you have more than 100 books you'd like to export from one shelf, you have to split them into multiple shelves.

Creating Shelves

You can create those in Goodreads und My Books and then Add shelf in the left-side menu:

Getting the Feed Base-URL

You get the RSS Base URL by setting the items loaded per page to infinite scroll and then click the orange RSS button in the bottom right.

This will open a new page. You can now copy that URL and remove everything after the last "=". This is your RSS Base URL. After setting this, you can add all the shelves you'd like to download by just adding their names (separated by comma) in the settings.

Running Booksidian

You can run the Booksidian sync by executing the "Booksidian Sync" command or by pressing the "B" in your menu bar.

Alternatively, you can set Booksidian to sync automatically by updating the frequency in the plugin settings.

Overwriting Notes

By default, once Booksidian has synced a book from your RSS feed and created a note, that note will never be updated or changed, even if the data related to that book changes within your feed. For example if you sync a book, then give it a rating and sync again, that rating will not be synced to the note.

To have Booksidian overwrite old notes, toggle the overwrite plugin setting on. This will cause Booksidian to always replace existing notes for books with new ones. Be careful though - if you've made your own updates to the notes files, they'll be lost on the next sync.

Output

In the end it's completely up to you how you style your book-notes. One thing I personally love is combining it with the dataview plugin and the new cards system in the minimal theme, which enables you to create beautiful little libraries like this:

You can achieve this look here by adding cssClasses: cards to the frontmatter of the file you'd like to have your library in and then pasting this code here:

table without id ("![](" + cover +")") as Cover, author as Author
where cover != null
sort rating desc

Please check out the amazing work of these two here and here.

Linking back to Goodreads

The Goodreads book id is provided as part of the available data in the plugin. You can create a link back to the Goodreads page for a book by doing:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/{{id}}