What The Well Bookshop is, and how it works

Where the data comes from

We build every series from public bibliographic sources, then check it by hand. The backbone comes from Wikidata and Open Library. Since sources vary in quality, we verify each series against publisher listings, official author sites and established retailers before it ships.

Sources sometimes disagree. When they do, we follow a fixed order: the publisher first, then the official author or franchise site, then industry bibliographic records, then retailers. ISBNs follow the same rule, so a valid number from a weak source still loses to the publisher's own listing.

We never guess a field. If no reliable source states a page count, an ISBN or a date, that field stays empty. Because a made-up answer spoils every list it touches, an empty one is the honest choice.

Published versus announced

The catalogue keeps two lanes that never blur. A book counts as published only once its release date has arrived. Anything with a future date is an announcement, and the site says so in the visible text, in the structured data and in the machine-readable feeds.

We recheck announced next releases every week against bibliographic records. When a publisher moves a date, we update the page instead of leaving it stale. If we cannot verify a claimed date, we leave it alone and flag it for human review. We never invent one.

Factual orders versus editorial guidance

Publication order and chronological order are facts, and we present them as facts. The recommended reading order is different. It is editorial guidance that we write, and we never present it as publisher canon.

Some series have a real debate about where to start. In that case, the series page says what we recommend and why. It still shows the factual orders, so you can disagree with us.

Corrections

Reading-order data earns trust by being checkable. Every series page names its sources. We also serve the same data in machine-readable form: the JSON API listed in robots.txt, the llms.txt summaries and the new-releases feed. Because of that, any mistake is easy to pin down.

Spotted an error? Start with the source list on the series page. If we differ from what the publisher states, we were wrong, and we fix it.