Nadia Not really. I would like to import a spreadsheet of my catalogue from LibraryThing but would have to choose an exclusive shelf for each of the books. If I go ahead, I would have a couple of hundred cookbooks and other reference books on my "to read" shelf, which would skew the stats of the books I actually want read.

wordrevel You don't have to choose an exclusive shelf!

Abbie Do we make it clear in the CSV instructions we send that you can leave that column blank/put in a custom exclusive shelf and that'll then become a tag if you don't want it to be to-read, read, currently-reading, or DNF?

Nadia Thanks for letting me know that has changed! I received a sample spreadsheet from Rob in July 2021 in which he stated that the exclusive shelf column must be filled up and "Exclusive Shelf (must be one of ‘read’, ‘currently-reading’, ’to-read’, or ‘did-not-finish’)". I'll have a go with importing the books I left out back then :)

wordrevel Ahhh, since then we've added more features to the import! But I'm not sure we've updated our template instructions to match so I'll check in on that!

Nadia I just did a test import with only one title in my spreadsheet. When I left the exclusive shelf column blank, the import wasn't recognised. I edited the file and only added "to-read" to the exclusive shelf column and the import was recognised, so it seems I won't be able to separate reference books from my TBR pile with this method...

wordrevel Ahh, I should have said: you need to put 'reference' in the Exclusive Shelf column.

thestorygraph Thanks for clarifying! I did that but once the import was complete, the book in my test file wasn't tagged. I tried again by adding "reference" under the Exclusive Shelf column and also the Bookshelves column. Duplicating did the trick! Though I'm not sure if that's a bug?

wordrevel My bad for also neglecting to mention that you'd need it in the Bookshelves column for the tagging part! With both those columns filled it, it'd mirror how it'd look if GR had given you an export. Glad you managed to get it working finally and sorry for the multiple rounds of this.

Nadia All good! Thank you for your help with sorting things out! :)

Nadia Following up to my feature request, I added a cookbook to my “currently reading” shelf to log a chapter that I read. How do I shift the book to a custom tag “referenced” such that it’s not in my “currently reading” list anymore without losing the pages I tracked in my reading stats?

wordrevel Oh, if you want to track pages, then they will have to go in your DNF or Read shelf. From your original post, I didn't think tracking pages was what was needed here. There are other posts on the roadmap for partial reads and things like that.

For DNFs, the ratings aren't skewed. You can add an "explanation" that you've just read a chapter for reference. Right now, we don't have any support for partial reads.

Alternatively, you can mark it as "read" and adapt the final journal entry to reflect the pages actually read, and add in your journal entry/review that you've only read "Chapters X, Y, Z".

Nadia Thank you for answering so quickly on a weekend. Totally wasn't expecting that. Hope you get enough rest, Nadia!!

Yeah, I think I didn't capture that too well in my original post because I was still wrapping my head around the problem. Since I do skim and read some books only partially on purpose (eg. books that contain essays written by different people), I still want to be able to track those pages. Thanks for clarifying about the stats. If I go the DNF route, will it be possible to exclude these from the yearly wrap-ups?

wordrevel No problem at all! Unfortunately, they won't be excluded. Ultimately we don't have the feature you'd like just yet and won't until you can either track partial reads or exclude books from your reading goal. I reckon, if it's only a handful of books. Now you have to decide semantically, which option you'd prefer: read but not really (and edited journal entries), or DNF with an explanation that says "just reading parts as it's a reference book for me"!

Nadia I see. Thank you for helping me figure out workarounds!