Export your Libby Timeline to Obsidian

I love reading and I love writing. Both are integral parts of learning. The reading to receive new ideas, the writing to cement those ideas to something.

As I stood up my blog I wondered how to get past books on here. There’s a way!

I now use Audible and Spotify audiobooks, but most of my past reads come from Libby.

Libby

Here’s how you do it using Python:

1. Open Libby app and figure out how to export your timeline. Somewhere in settings. It’ll produce a CSV.
2. Go through that CSV and creat a column “read” that identified the ones you actually began (sigh…so many books I placed holds on but never read….)
3. Run this python script and it’ll create an obsidian markdown file for each. Tweak it to match your preferences. I personally use quarto to blog so I have a naming convention for the files and metadata.
4. Or! Just ask ChatGPT to do this for you lol.

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import pandas as pd
import os
import zipfile
import re

# Load the provided spreadsheet using pandas
file_path = "~/Downloads/libbytimeline-activities.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(file_path)

# Parse the timestamp into the format yyyy-mm-dd and rename the column to 'date'
df["timestamp_raw"] = df["timestamp"]
df["timestamp"] = pd.to_datetime(df["timestamp"], format="%m/%d/%y %H:%M")
# create a stringed date
df["date"] = df["timestamp"].dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

df[["date", "timestamp_raw"]]

# Custom column: Filter rows where read == 1 (went through spreadsheet to filter out those I had borrowed but never read).
df = df[df["read"] == 1]

# De-duplicate by title, keeping the most recent record (sorted by date)
df = df.sort_values("timestamp", ascending=False).drop_duplicates("title")

# Create a new column 'created' with today's date in yyyy-mm-dd format
today = datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
df["created"] = today

# Create a new column 'date-finished' that's the timestamp's date + 21 days
df["date-finished"] = (df["timestamp"] + timedelta(days=21)).dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

# Prepare for markdown file creation
output_directory = os.path.expanduser("~/Desktop/markdown_files")
os.makedirs(output_directory, exist_ok=True)

# Loop through each item in the dataframe and create a markdown file
for index, row in df.iterrows():
    markdown_content = f"""
---
title: {row['title']}
description: _{row['title']}_ by {row['author']}. Published by {row['publisher']}, with ISBN {row['isbn']}. Read on {row['date']}
date: {row['date']}
categories: book-review
created: {row['created']}
draft: false
author: {row['author']}
book-year: 1000
book-time: 0
date-start: {row['date']}
date-finished: {row['date-finished']}
pct-complete: 0
---

![]({row['cover']}){{.preview-image}}
"""
    filename = re.sub(r"[^\w]", "-", row["title"]).lower()
    filename = re.sub(r"-+", "-", filename)
    file_path = os.path.join(output_directory, f"{filename}.md")
    with open(file_path, "w") as file:
        file.write(markdown_content.strip())
    print(f"Created {file_path}")

# Zip the markdown files
zip_file_path = os.path.expanduser("~/Desktop/markdown_files.zip")
with zipfile.ZipFile(zip_file_path, "w") as zipf:
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(output_directory):
        for file in files:
            zipf.write(os.path.join(root, file), file)

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Bryan lives somewhere at the intersection of faith, fatherhood, and futurism and writes about tech, books, Christianity, gratitude, and whatever’s on his mind. If you liked reading, perhaps you’ll also like subscribing: