More accurate Reading Levels

[mralloway]

I'm an elementary school teacher and I love Bookpedia for my classroom library. I know that Bookpedia pulls the reading age level for books from Amazon but it would be a very useful feature for school teachers if the search result could pull some kind of specific reading level. Like a Guided Reading Level, Reading Recovery Level or Lexile Level. I know that Scholastic provides this information for all books in their extensive catalog. Is there a way to have Bookpedia search Scholastic for that information?

[Conor]

Unfortunately, Scholastic themselves don't provide a way to access this data in an automated way from a computer. Will do a search on Google and see if we can find anything that would fit with Bookpedia that would have this information.

[mralloway]

Thanks for the reply Conor,

This is the way many of my colleagues use the Scholastic site for this purpose. It is called their Book Wizard. Type in the title and it outputs the the book level: http://bookwizard.scholastic.com/tbw/homePage.do
Is this still no good for Bookpedia? I don't really know what you need but I am willing to look.

[mralloway]

How about this site? http://www.lexile.com/DesktopDefault.as ... pageid=313
It appears that this info is also sent in Barnes& Noble results.

[Conor]

Thank you for the extra information. We have taken a look at both and written to Lexile to find out if there is a way to access this information (they license it out, but I think on a bigger scale). What we are actually looking for is a computer interface for these databases. It's called an API (Application Programming Interface) and allows programs to communicate in a more standardized manner that avoid making mistakes. For example the websites you pointed at only have the regular interface that as a human you can read and comprehend, but to a computer the English language is still a mystery; they prefer formated information in the form of XML (most commonly used today).