Because each author not on the site has to be audited by a human, prior to adding. Let me quickly explain the process:
Claire imports her list from Goodreads. It has exactly 1,000 books on it.
Our system auto-matches as best as it can with the books and authors we have in the system.
At this point, 850 books matched perfectly. Claire's "read" status and book rating are carried over and converted.
The other 150 books that were unable to be matched show up on an internal page, where we then have to "audit" the list prior to the import being complete.
This is where things get tricky. Some of the book matches are easy. The Goodreads sheet may have the book "Jack Reacher #1: Killing Floor" on it, while our system has "Killing Floor". We click a button to tell our system that is a match, and in the future any time that book comes in it will auto match that so we don't have to do it again.
However there are authors we don't have, and we have to audit their entire list prior to adding them. Let's say one of the books on Claire's list was Cujo by Stephen King, and we didn't have Stephen King on our site yet(perish the thought!). We have to audit Stephen Kings entire book list. Every book, every edition, every collection, every co-author and so on. Even if Claire only had that one book by Stephen King on her list, we still have to audit his ENTIRE list prior to adding.
So that's where, unfortunately, the process can take time. Now the good thing about this is it's future-proofing the site. The more Goodreads imports that come in, the more we work on these and adding authors, the less audits we will have to make in the future. But I just want to make you aware that depending on the size if your Goodreads import file, if you import it in 2023, the time it will take to complete it will range from a day to a couple of months.