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Book Series In Order — Reading Order Scraper

Scrapes book series reading order data from bookseriesinorder.com. Returns publication order, chronological order, series positions, and book metadata for thousands of authors, series, and characters.

ISBN databases and metadata APIs don't give you reading order. That's not an oversight — they weren't built for it. Bookseriesinorder.com is the canonical source for exactly this, and this actor walks its entire catalog.

What It Extracts

One record per book per section. An author with a 20-book series listed under both publication order and chronological order produces 40 records — same books, different sequence context.

How to Use

Full catalog crawl: Leave startUrls empty. The actor walks all 26 sitemaps (~5,000+ pages) and emits one record per book per section. Use maxItems to cap the total. Long runs take hours — set a generous timeout.

Targeted scrape: Provide specific author or series URLs in startUrls. Returns all book sections on those pages.

{
"startUrls":[
{"url":"https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/lee-child/"},
{"url":"https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/james-patterson/"}
],
"maxItems":500
}

Input Parameters

Scale

The site covers 5,000+ author and series pages. A full run returns millions of records — every book in every series listed under every available order type. Most use cases want a targeted subset via startUrls.

Why This Data

Open Library, Google Books, and Goodreads expose metadata — title, ISBN, cover, author, description. None of them expose clean publication-vs-chronological series ordering. Library apps, recommendation engines, and reading tracker tools need this distinction. Bookseriesinorder.com is the only structured source for it.

Technical Notes

• No proxy required. The site returns 200 on standard requests.
• Concurrency is kept low (3 concurrent, 500ms delay) out of courtesy to a small content site.
• Both author pages (e.g. /lee-child/) and character/series pages (e.g. /scot-harvath/) are handled.
• maxItems caps total records across all pages. A single author page can produce hundreds of records.

Data sourced from bookseriesinorder.com. Actor by OrbTop.