A Free Goodreads Alternative: Track Your Books in a Spreadsheet
Goodreads works, but plenty of readers want out — the interface is dated, the recommendations are noisy, and your reading data lives on someone else’s platform. If you’ve been looking for a Goodreads alternative, the simplest one isn’t another app to sign up for. It’s a spreadsheet you own: private, ad-free, endlessly customizable, and yours forever. Here’s how to build a reading tracker that does everything you actually used Goodreads for.
What to track (the Goodreads essentials)
A good reading tracker captures the handful of things that make logging worthwhile:
- Title and author — the basics.
- Status — to-be-read, currently reading, or finished.
- Rating — your star rating, on whatever scale you like.
- Date finished — so you can count books per month and year.
- Format — physical, ebook, or audiobook.
- Genre — so you can see what you actually read (versus what you think you read).
- A notes column — the quick review or favorite quote Goodreads buried three taps deep.
That’s the whole core. Everything else is a bonus you get to design yourself.
The things a spreadsheet does better
Once your books are in rows, a spreadsheet quietly beats the app in a few ways:
- A reading dashboard. Total books this year, pages read, average rating, your progress toward a reading goal — all calculated automatically as you log.
- A real TBR list. Your to-be-read pile as its own tab, sortable by priority, length, or mood.
- Series tracking. Which books in a series you’ve read and which are next — without hunting through a feed.
- Total privacy. No feed, no followers, no ads, no algorithm nudging you toward whatever’s trending. Just your books.
- It’s yours. Export it, back it up, tweak it. Nobody can change the features or take it away.
Import your Goodreads history
Leaving Goodreads doesn’t mean starting over. Goodreads lets you export your library to a CSV (Account → Settings → export), which opens straight in Google Sheets or Excel. Map the columns you care about — title, author, rating, date read — into your tracker, and years of reading history come with you.
Grab the free reading tracker
Ready to switch? Our free Reading Tracker gives you the core setup — log a book and your dashboard and stats update themselves.
For the full system, the Book & Reading Tracker adds an automatic reading dashboard and goal, a TBR and wishlist, and a series tracker, in Google Sheets and Excel, light and dark — a private, ad-free home for every book you read.
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