There’s something stark and daunting at being told you have over 100 unread titles, most of which were picked up as sodding 99p Daily Deals.Īppreciating I don’t come out of this article very well, I do have a tip if you ever find yourself psychologically distracted by the ways of the Kindle. The pressure! There’s something romantic and wistful about looking at a shelf of unread books. That reminds you just how many books you’ve left to read. When you get to the end of a book and have declined the polite invitation to review it, there’s the home screen. Bizarrely, I find myself switching to the Kindle itself at every opportunity to keep my pace up. The standalone Kindle is a kinder beast, more inclined to tempt me with the sight of the finish line than the iPad app, or the version for my Blackberry. Every single instance of this is a small victory and, rather than spurring frustration, it drives me forward, not knowing whether or not the Kindle has a surprise for me.įurthermore, I’ve discovered that my reading speed and estimated time left tends to vary by device. Then I hit the index, or the appendix, or the Kindle just seems to have miscalculated. I often read very heavy political tomes, for instance, where I get to 76% of the book read (or thereabouts), and find it stops. Here, again, I regularly find myself trying to outwit my device. “An ominous, ever-present percentage hovers in the bottom-right of the screen.”Įven without the reading time calculator, an ominous, ever-present percentage hovers in the bottom-right of the screen telling me how much of the book I’ve read so far. Let me do a couple of pages and I’ll be right back with you…. I can fit that in! Might even get it read by the time I’m done with this article. It tells me the whole book is going to take me 1 hour and 14 minutes to read. For example, I’m on page one of Professor Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen’s Human Universe right this second. Easy-peasyĪt first, it looks like every book is going to be a breeze. So I read a couple of pages of my highly intellectual book of choice, and at the bottom of the screen, my Kindle quickly gives me an estimate of how long it’s going to take me to get to the end of it. A bit sinister, but I can live with that. In fact, it’s only just begun.įor once you open a book and get going, the Kindle tells you, in a quiet message down at the bottom of the screen, that it’s learning your reading speed. Yet the analysis of my reading doesn’t stop there. I am a weak person and I can’t help sometimes needing one. Straight away, my Kindle has given me a target. Naturally, whoever read all those fruity books just happened to have hacked my account at the time, and if I ever catch them, rest assured there will be consequences. I certainly didn’t, and now every book I read and how long it takes me to read it, is recorded somewhere in Amazon’s mothership, no doubt hovering invisibly above the Earth. Sure, you can dig into the settings of your Kindle device and account to play with the security settings.
The more I pondered that statistic, the more it made me realise that Amazon was watching me. It takes 4 hours 48 minutes for most people to read that book does it? Well, let’s see if I can shave 20 minutes off that. In much the same way that a satnav gives you an estimated arrival time and you can’t help but attempt to knock, legally, a few minutes off the time just to see if you can – now you have a target. What kind of trick is that? There are two things that instantly strike me about it.
As such, more often than not, you’re told how long, on average, people have taken to read it.
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