Know a story's shape before you read a single chapter.
Fabledex is a metadata service for stories. It keeps the structural data a book, series, or show does not ship with — story arcs, episode types, chapter-by-chapter beats — contributed and corrected by readers, and serves it through one API so any app can pull it in an instant.
The data every story app rebuilds from scratch
Catalogues know a book's title, author and page count. None of them know that chapters 1 to 5 are the beginning arc, that the training arc starts at chapter 6, or that episode 13 is a tournament episode. Every reading tracker, recap tool, recommendation engine and fan project that needs that works it out alone, and keeps it to itself.
One reliable source, maintained by its readers
Fabledex collects that structure once, as community-contributed metadata with revision history and contributor counts, and makes it available to every developer through the same endpoints. Built by a developer for personal own projects first, so the API is shaped around actually consuming it.
What Fabledex keeps
Story arcs
Named spans over chapters or episodes: beginning, training, tournament, war, aftermath. Nested arcs for long series.
Episode types
What each chapter or episode is: setup, training, battle, filler, flashback, recap. Tagged per unit, queryable as a whole.
Community metadata
Anything readers find worth recording: characters introduced per chapter, point-of-view shifts, timelines, content notes.
Provenance
Every value carries who contributed it, how many agreed, and a confidence score, so your app can decide what to trust.
How it works
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1
Readers contribute
A reader marks where an arc begins and ends, or tags an episode's type. Others confirm or correct it. Nothing is final; everything is versioned.
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2
Fabledex consolidates
Contributions are merged into one canonical record per story with agreement counts and confidence, keyed by stable story identifiers.
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3
Your service pulls it
One request returns the whole chapter-to-chapter structure. Show a reader which arc they are in, skip filler, or build on top of it.
What a response looks like
An illustration of the shape the API is being designed around. The endpoints are not live yet; this is what the first version aims to return.
GET /api/v1/stories/the-way-of-kings/arcs{
"story": "the-way-of-kings",
"unit": "chapter",
"arcs": [
{ "title": "Beginning", "type": "setup", "from": 1, "to": 5 },
{ "title": "Training", "type": "training", "from": 6, "to": 12 },
{ "title": "First trial", "type": "tournament", "from": 13, "to": 19 }
],
"episode_types": { "6": "training", "7": "training", "13": "battle" },
"contributors": 14,
"confidence": 0.92
}
Chapters 1 to 5 are the beginning arc, 6 to 12 the training arc, and chapter 13 opens the first trial. Your app knew that before the reader did.
Built for other developers
Fabledex exists because its author needed this data for personal projects and could not find a dependable source. The goal is a service other developers can rely on the same way: stable identifiers, plain JSON, versioned responses, and an open contribution model so the data keeps improving without anyone having to maintain a private copy.
- Plain JSON over HTTPS
- Stable story and chapter identifiers
- Confidence and contributor counts on every field
- Contribute back from your own app
Early access
The service is being built in the open. Create an account to follow along and be first to contribute data and get API access.