Hello all,
I am interested in purchasing an eBook reader. I would like to be able access my reading statistics: time spend reading, number pages read, titles, etc for analysis.
Has anyone been able to get any QS related data off of a Kindle, Nook, or other eReader?
Thanks,
Jason
This is a great question. I would like to know this too. I’ll see what I can turn up.
Jason, are you open to e-reading apps on a tablet computer instead of a pure eReader like a Kindle or Nook? Because I suspect that’s a much better bet. My Kindle can’t even preserve line breaks in highlighted passages : )
I just received my ebook Reader (Bookeen Cybook Odyssey HD FrontLight) yesterday but I was able to extract two things easilly : my annotations (thanks to this Python script and a bit of bash scripting) and the list of currently opened books with the page number (using just sqlite3 to query the table T_ITEM in the database /system/library ).
I plan to integrate it with my wiki so that I don’t have to type this anymore but instead automatically make a note for each book (or research article) read and complete it later on. i already tracked my reading habbits a bit in the past but stopped after a while, hopefully this level of automation will push me again.
[align=center]
Date when a book was finished, for further details like notes on each book,
length, ISBN, time required to finish, etc, individual pages have to be checked[/align]
This time I’m thinking of making a visualization with bar graph of the number of pages read daily and the number of annotations or highlighted passages.
Regarding the initial question " time spend reading, number pages read, titles, etc for analysis." I’m not sure the device Im using can provide the time spent reading directly, it would probably have to be inferred from other data, maybe keeping track of the timestamp of the database, I would have to check that to be sure but it could very interesting to provide insight into books that are most likely harder to read vs. fatigue (e.g. assuming a book has a constant level of difficulty, if the average pace on a book drops one can assume the reader is tired). I suppose more complex notions could be interesting (e.g. pace compared to previous articles from the same author or an author of the bibliography) but this is more about the library itself than the ebook reader.
Fabian, as you learn more I think I think this would make a great show&tell talk at the QS Global Conference this fall, if you can make it to SF. Or perhaps in Europe next year?
Rajiv Mehta did a talk at a recent Bay Area Quantified Self about tracking his reading. You can view the video here: https://vimeo.com/groups/quantifiedself/videos/62746433
Gary
Gary, if I believe it is worth doing a Show&Tell I’ll consider presenting the results of course, either locally in Brussels or wherever I might be then.
Here is a current more dynamic visualization of my readings thanks to a friend http://demo.franck-brignoli.fr/cybook/ . The process is nearly entirely automated but I still have to plug my ebook reader to my laptop to generate a datapoint (impossible to do via WiFi so far).