Short Reads
Books under 20,000 words can be finished in under an hour and a half. Examples include 'The Wardens of Cape Cod' and 'Balloon Observation.' They are good for a single sitting.
Reading Tracker
Choose a book, record where you are, and set a daily goal. Your progress is stored in localStorage in this browser; it is not uploaded to a user account.
No sign-up required
Stored in your browser
Estimated time remaining
Choose a book
If the EPUB has no fixed print pagination, the tool starts with an estimated page count and lets you replace it with the page total shown by your own reader.
Reading progress
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Remaining
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Estimated time left
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At your daily goal
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Stored locally
Reading history
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How the progress estimate works
The Reading tool estimates how long it will take to read a book, based on the number of words and an average reading speed of about 230 words per minute. These are estimates, not guarantees—your pace may vary.
The catalog includes books of many lengths. The median book is about 54,000 words, which would take roughly four hours. You can sort by length or time to find a book that fits your schedule.
Medium Reads
Books between 20,000 and 60,000 words take about two to four hours. Many manuals and histories fall here, like 'The Training of an Infantry Company' and 'Historical Record of the Eighty-eighth Regiment.'
Long and Epic Reads
Long books (60,000–150,000 words) take five to ten hours; epics (over 150,000) take more than ten. 'The Victories of Wellington' is over 200,000 words, a substantial commitment.
Building a Page-Based Plan
The Reading Tracker is built around pages, not minutes or sections. You enter your current page, the total pages, and a daily page goal, and the tool calculates how many days remain. The underlying assumption is that you read a certain number of pages each day, and that is a concrete, measurable commitment.
A long book like 'A history of the administration of the Royal Navy and of merchant shipping in relation to the Navy from MDIX to MDCLX, with an introduction treating of the preceding — Inside the Classic' (id 297) has an estimated 185,834 words. At 250 words per page, that is about 744 pages. If you set a daily goal of 20 pages, the tracker would estimate 38 days to finish. That is a substantial project, but knowing the number in advance helps you decide if you are ready.
Setting the total page count
The tracker uses an initial page estimate of word count divided by 250 words per page. For the Royal Navy history, that gives roughly 744 pages. But that is only an estimate. If your edition has different pagination, you can replace the total with the number shown in your reading app or printed book. The tool is flexible by design.
Why 250 words per page? That is a common average for a printed page, but it varies widely. A dense academic text might have 400 words per page, while a large-print edition might have 150. The tracker lets you adjust, so the estimate is just a starting point.
Daily goal and finish date
The default daily goal is 20 pages, but you can change it to anything that fits your schedule. The estimated finish days are calculated as the ceiling of remaining pages divided by daily goal. If you have 744 pages and read 20 per day, that is 38 days. If you can manage 30 per day, it drops to 25 days.
The tracker also shows estimated remaining time in minutes, proportional to the total estimated minutes. For the Royal Navy history, the estimated total is 808 minutes. If you are halfway through (372 pages), the remaining time would be about 404 minutes. That gives you a sense of the total time investment, even though progress is tracked in pages.
Progress history and local storage
Your progress history is saved in your browser's localStorage. That means it stays on your device, and no account is required. If you clear your browser data, the history will be lost. The tracker is a personal tool, not a cloud service.
Because progress is recorded in pages, you need to update it regularly. The tracker does not count sections or minutes as progress—only pages. That keeps the system simple and consistent. If you read 10 pages in a sitting, you enter that number, and the tracker recalculates.
A concrete example
Take 'A history of the administration of the Royal Navy and of merchant shipping in relation to the Navy from MDIX to MDCLX, with an introduction treating of the preceding — Inside the Classic' as a planning exercise. With 744 estimated pages and a 20-page daily goal, you would finish in about 38 days. If you prefer to read only on weekdays, you might set a higher daily goal to compensate. The tracker's arithmetic is straightforward, but it forces you to be realistic about your reading habits.
Once you finish, you can clear the history and start a new book. The tracker is not a library catalog; it is a personal progress log. Use it alongside the Finder and Compare tools to choose books that fit your pace, and you will find that even the longest titles become manageable.