It's not all the time there, no, but every time I flip the page, it flashes that bar in and out, which I found distracting, and it leaves a little ghosting, so I removed it as much as possible. The numbers and the border around the bar are actually graphics, so I replaced them with transparent ones (thus they vanish entirely), but the bar itself is computed by the device / hardcoded, so I haven't found a way to remove that also.
I could add a thousand empty pages to each book so the bar would always stay one pixel thin throughout the book, but that's not really practical.
And then they go and add a page numbers off language string to the language file but no actual setting or code to go with it to actually disable it.
So you're like yay when you discover those language strings but meh when there's nothing behind it.
I'm happy with the device also (probably would be less happy if I hadn't modded it), but for its lack of settings - since they added that progress bar afterwards with a firmware update not sure which version, they should've added a setting for it at the same time, but no... oh well