Why is it that every ebook reader on the market can show that you’ve completed reading an ebook, but most can’t show you when you finished reading a book?
I feel like reading statistics are something that is seriously undervalued and underdeveloped when it comes to ebooks. So far most companies just collect reading data for themselves for their own benefit, while leaving readers in the dark. That needs to change.
I recently found myself considering rereading The Stand by Stephen King because it’s one of my favorite books of all time. But I can’t remember how long it’s been since I last read it.
Considering I own a digital copy of the book, you’d think it would be easy to determine that, but it’s not. If it wasn’t for Amazon’s Reading Insights page I wouldn’t have been able to figure out that I last read that particular ebook in 2019. Most Kindle users probably don’t even know that Reading Insights page exists, and Amazon does a poor job of integrating that information into Kindle devices.
Kindle ereaders don’t show any kind of reading stats or reading insights whatsoever. They mark books as “read” when you finish reading them and that’s all you get.
However, Kindle apps show the same reading insights that you can view on Amazon’s website. That’s one of the most irritating things about Kindles: Amazon adds features to Kindle apps that they never add to Kindle ereaders. There’s no valid reason why they can’t show reading insights on Kindle ereaders too.
Kobo has a section on their ereaders that shows “Reading Stats”, but the information is very limited. It just shows how long you’ve spent reading, your average minutes read per session, and average pages read per minute. The estimated reading time is pretty cool and can be helpful at times, but I’m not training for a speed reading competition so I couldn’t care less about the time-based reading stats. They should show more useful information like date completed, date purchased (or borrowed), average reading time to finish a book (like they show on their website), total pages, pages remaining, highlighted sections, notes, etc.
The only ereaders I know of that show a date completed time is Boox devices with their built-in NeoReader app, but not all of them support reading stats. My older Note2 doesn’t have that section at all, but the newer Go 7 models do.
My Pocketbook basic ereader shows the date when you added an ebook to the device, but it doesn’t show the date completed or any other reading stats.
Considering all the tracking these companies do on customer’s reading habits, you’d think they could provide more useful reading stats to the user directly on their reading devices. I can’t believe Onyx is the only one that shows a date completed on individual titles.
Nooks show date completed in the library list view and have a progress bar for any open books. Not sure if there are more stats for actual nookbooks as all I have on mine right now are sideloaded books.
Sony gives you last accessed date and time.