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Originally Posted by davidfor
It is absolutely possible and they almost definitely do it. For their e-ink devices, they are recording the time since the last tap to decide if the device should go to sleep.
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Hmmm. That's an interesting point -- but I see some problems with leaping from "timing taps" to "timing book pages".
Remember, ebooks are not necessarily read on Kindle devices -- and even when they are read on Kindles, they are not necessarily read on devices that are dedicated to reading. For example, I read ebooks either on my laptop or on one of my Fires. On the laptop, the Kindle app never "sleeps" as such, and I never have to "tap" at all to advance through a book -- I can scroll continuously. And when I read on a Fire (which I can also scroll instead of tap), my "tap" may be either a tap to advance a page, or it may be a tap to switch to another app, or any of a multitude of other things.
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Or maybe a simple count of the number of pages displayed for long enough to be counted as "read".
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But "page" count doesn't mean much with ebooks, because that will vary greatly with customized features such as font size, margin size, and so on. You'd have to calculate on something like word count or percentage instead.
An additional problem: Would you report total time to advance to the end of the book, or average time per page, or what? For instance, if I opened a book and left it open on the first page, then went off to do something else for a few hours, then came back and scrolled quickly through the rest of the book, how would that be tallied?
And another problem: If you are trying to count time spent on each and every page (or each and every given percentage point), wouldn't that require a lot of complicated record-keeping? Those files that accompany, for instance, azw-format books (mbp, phl, apnx) are small files. I'm not educated enough to know what's in them, but is there really room there for such granular timekeeping records?
It's an interesting puzzle -- and yes, a bit pointless to ponder, given that Amazon is unlikely to tell us what method it actually uses. OTOH, IMHO their very reluctance tells us that their methods are not all that impressive; there would be no need to hide them if they were.