[SlowRain]

A few years ago I read Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow. In it was a chapter called Investigation Approaches Climax . I looked down at my progress bar and saw I still had over a third of the book left to go (almost half). I immediately knew there would be no ending anytime soon because there would be some twist introduced. That foreknowledge denied me the experience of the twist (it should be noted that the pbook readers experience the same thing).
It got me thinking that there was an opportunity here for readers of e-books to not see the end coming.

It also reminded me of the movie Minority Report , where there's a scene, far enough into the movie to be plausible, in which the audience believes the ending is near, only to have a twist introduced and the story take off again.

As such, I now turn off the progress bar on my reading software so that I truly don't know when the climax will come. I've been doing it for a couple years now, and I enjoy the feeling.

I still turn the progress bar on when I'm not enjoying a book, just to see how much more I have to endure. If it's a lot, I give up and move on to something else.

Has anyone else tried turning off the progress bar? What do you think? If you haven't, I recommend giving it a try. It's a little weird at first, and some may find it unbearable, but I think it's at least worth a try.