The Book Numbering menu provides book-wide continuous numbering for a couple of items (pages, chapters) but unfortunately not for Footnotes.
However, this is partly inside of what can be achieved with scripting. It is not possible (*) to make this happen automatically when inserting or removing footnotes, or when adding, removing, or re-ordering documents inside a book, but at least it's easy enough to run the following script after you did so.
It opens all of the book's documents and sets the Footnote Starting Number to the correct value for documents that do contain footnotes. Nothing else happens; you'll end up with a screenful of documents, some of which may be altered, so you can verify if it worked correctly. You'll have to save the documents yourself, or discard them if you no like – I am confident it all works correctly but then again you never know.
If "scripting" is a new, thus far undiscovered feature for you, read up on how to 'get' this into your local InDesign on InDesignSecrets: https://indesignsecrets.com/how-to-install-a-script-in-indesign-that-you-found-in-a-forum-or-blog-po.... You need to know what type of script it is to give it the correct file extension; this one is Javascript so save as "updateFootnoteNumbers.jsx" (technically it's its older & ever so dumber cousin "ExtendScript", but that messes up the mnemonic for the proper extension).
//DESCRIPTION: Update a book's continuous note numbering
// A Jongware Script 23-Nov-2019
/* initialize the first document's note number */
firstNoteNumber = 1;
/* open all of a book's documents one by one */
for (i = 0; i < app.activeBook.bookContents.length; i++)
{
app.open (app.activeBook.bookContents[i].fullName, true)
/* try and find any footnote */
app.findTextPreferences = null;
app.findTextPreferences.findWhat = "^F"
anyFn = app.activeDocument.findText();
if (anyFn.length)
{
/* adjust its start number ... */
app.activeDocument.footnoteOptions.startAt = firstNoteNumber;
/* ... and adjust for the next document */
firstNoteNumber += anyFn[0].parentStory.footnotes.length;
}
}
(*) Only purely theoretically speaking that might also be possible. However, even only trying to see if if can be done would take way longer than the ±10 minutes it took me to whip this up for you, so if you don't mind I'll leave that part to Adobe to add as a Major Improvement to the Next Big New Version™.
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