Quick Reads
Under 2 hours. Eight books fit this category, including short accounts like 'The Voyage of the Oregon' at about 45 minutes.
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
Estimating reading time helps you choose a book that fits your schedule. The catalog provides a median word count of about 83,000, which translates to roughly 361 minutes at an average reading speed. But individual books vary widely.
The reading tool uses a standard pace of about 230 words per minute. Adjust for your own speed and reading habits. Some books, with dense prose or many footnotes, may take longer.
Steady Reads
Two to four hours. Twenty-four titles fall here, offering a manageable commitment for a few evenings.
Immersive Reads
Four to eight hours. Thirty-six books require this much time, ideal for a weekend or longer vacation.
Planning Your Reading with the Tracker
The Reading Tracker helps you sustain progress through a book by recording pages read, not sections or minutes. You set a current page, a total page count, and a daily page goal. The tracker then estimates remaining time and finish date based on those numbers. This simple approach works with any edition, because you can replace the total page count with the one from your own reading app or physical book.
Setting Up Your Progress
When you start a book, the tracker needs a total page count. For many public-domain texts, the archive does not have a fixed page count, so it estimates one using the formula ceil(word_count / 250). For example, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia — A Reader’s Guide has 16,408 words, so the estimated total is ceil(16408 / 250) = 66 pages. You can keep this estimate or replace it with the page count shown by your e-reader or printed edition, which may differ due to formatting.
The tracker also asks for your current page. If you are just beginning, that is page 1. If you have already read some, enter the last page you finished. The daily page goal defaults to 20 pages, but you can adjust it to match your available time. A higher goal will finish the book sooner, but a realistic goal is more sustainable.
Understanding the Estimates
The tracker calculates estimated remaining time using the formula estimated_minutes × remaining_pages / total_pages. This assumes a constant reading speed, which may not hold for every book, but it gives a rough idea. For instance, if you are reading A Briefe and True Report and you are on page 33 of 66, with an estimated total time of 72 minutes, the remaining time would be about 72 × (66-33)/66 = 36 minutes.
Estimated finish days are calculated as ceil(remaining_pages / daily_page_goal). If you have 33 pages left and a goal of 20 pages per day, you would finish in ceil(33/20) = 2 days. This helps you plan your reading schedule and see the effect of adjusting your daily goal.
Tracking Across Sessions
The tracker stores your progress history in your browser's localStorage, so you can close the page and return later without losing your place. No account is required. This is convenient for books that you read over several days or weeks, such as a longer work like Narrative of the Portuguese embassy to Abyssinia during the years 1520-1527 — Context and Discussion, which has an estimated reading time of 690 minutes. With a daily goal of 20 pages, you can break it into manageable chunks.
The tracker does not record sections or minutes as progress—only pages. This keeps the system simple and compatible with any edition. If you prefer to measure progress by chapters, you can still use the tracker by estimating pages per chapter, but the tool itself is page-based.