I’ve tried everything, pretty much.

Lists are the main reason everything else is broken. I have a list of 100-something nonfiction and a second list of 50-something books I consider high quality books on intelligence/what makes us tick/what we’ll need for AI that I’m not willing to give up and I’m not willing to manually type one at a time to import somewhere else. I also have 500-something mysteries just to split those out from everything else, but that one’s sloppier and less maintained and I don’t care about it.

Eventually, I probably am going to manually do a lot of cleanup, but I’d rather do it when I’m ready to self host so I can completely structure the data the way I want. None of them really let you treat series as first class citizens either, which is how I’d prefer to organize my fiction. I’d prefer to display my fiction or sub-categories as “Karen Rose’s Romantic Suspense”, “Lee Child’s Jack Reacher”, “Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive”, “CJ Archer’s Glass and Steele” etc, and do a couple paragraphs on the style of each. I don’t want to do that for all 10-30 books in each series.