Kindle Paperlight progress bar concept
Enter your text here...Since I was little, I've always struggled being consistent with reading. I'd usually buy a book, thrilled by the idea of reading it, bring it home, read a few chapters and then abandon it.
I'm not entirely sure why. My fiancé says that's because I choose the wrong books, I've always told myself that's because I'm a visual person, so I tend to prefer more interactive kind of media. I've recently read this really good article by Darragh Murphy about his experience with reading: https://medium.com/@dazzz/how-i-went-from-reading-2-books-to-27-books-a-year-01190aa3e0c2.
Following the Microsoft's mantra, this got me thinking about how the products and services we use can help us achieve more and realized that even when using my Kindle, something's missing. I managed to pin this feeling down to the lack of sense of where I am in the narrative arc. With hard copies you can see how many pages you've read and you can start mentally thinking about whether it's worth to keep investing your time in reading the book based on your experience until that point. This is much harder to do with a digital copy, since that physicality is taken away and you're left with numbers and percentages that don't necessarily mean much. Computing what "being at page 124" or "have read 39% of a book" means is much harder than just looking at a book and seeing where the bookmark falls.
Here's a #freeconcept of a progress bar on #AmazonKindle I created. It's something I wish it was there as I believe it make my reading experience feel that bit more natural.
What do you think, would this help you reading more or better?