Quick Reads
Books under 10,000 words, estimated to take under an hour. Ideal for a short sitting or a sample of an author's style.
Reading Tracker
Choose a book, record where you are, and set a daily goal. Your progress is stored in localStorage in this browser; it is not uploaded to a user account.
No sign-up required
Stored in your browser
Estimated time remaining
Choose a book
If the EPUB has no fixed print pagination, the tool starts with an estimated page count and lets you replace it with the page total shown by your own reader.
Reading progress
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Remaining
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Estimated time left
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At your daily goal
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Stored locally
Reading history
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How the progress estimate works
The Reading Time Guide gives honest estimates of how long it might take to read each book. Estimates are based on word count and a typical reading speed. They are not exact predictions, but they help you plan your reading sessions.
The catalog includes books of varying lengths, from quick reads under 10,000 words to longer works exceeding 70,000 words. Use the guide to find a book that fits your available time and reading pace.
Steady Reads
Books between 10,000 and 40,000 words, often taking a few hours. Suitable for a weekend or several evenings.
Immersive Reads
Books over 40,000 words, taking several hours or more. These are substantial works that reward dedicated reading time.
Planning a Sustainable Pace with the Reading Tracker
The Reading Tracker in the DEINP Historical Children’s Library is built around a simple idea: progress is measured in pages, not in chapters or minutes. You set a current page, a total page count, and a daily goal, and the tracker estimates how many days remain. That page-based focus works well for older books, where chapter lengths vary widely and a reading app may count pages differently than a print edition.
Start with a Realistic Page Count
For each book, the tracker offers an initial page estimate based on a default of 250 words per page. That estimate is a starting point, not a fixed rule. If your own edition or reading app shows a different total, you can replace the tracker’s number with that total. For a collection like Floyd's Flowers; Or, Duty and Beauty for Colored Children Being One Hundred Short Stories Gleaned from the Storehouse of Human Knowledge and Experience: Simple — Key Ideas to Explore, the estimate matters because the book is substantial. At roughly 68,891 words, the default calculation suggests about 276 pages. If your edition runs longer or shorter, adjusting the total keeps the remaining-time estimate honest.
The tracker also lets you set a daily page goal. The interface shows a default of 20 pages, but you can choose a number that fits your schedule. A lower goal, such as 10 pages, stretches the timeline but makes each session lighter. A higher goal, such as 30 pages, finishes sooner but demands more time per sitting. The estimated finish days update accordingly, so you can see the trade-off instantly without doing the arithmetic yourself.
Use the Estimates to Shape Your Sessions
Once the total and daily goal are set, the tracker calculates estimated remaining time in minutes and estimated finish days. The time estimate is proportional: if you have read half the pages, you have roughly half the estimated minutes left. That is useful for planning a reading session around a commute or a quiet hour. For example, with Floyd's Flowers, the catalog lists an estimated reading time of 300 minutes. If you have completed 100 of 276 pages, the tracker would suggest about 109 minutes remain, assuming the default page estimate. That tells you a single sitting might finish the rest, or that two shorter sittings would work better.
The finish-day estimate is simply the remaining pages divided by your daily goal, rounded up. If you read 20 pages a day from that same point, you would finish in about 9 days. If you drop to 10 pages a day, the estimate jumps to 18 days. Seeing both numbers side by side helps you decide whether a faster pace is worth the extra daily commitment or whether a slower, steadier approach fits your routine better.
Track Progress Without Extra Friction
The tracker stores your progress history in the current browser using localStorage, so no account is required. That means you can close the page and return later without losing your place. The trade-off is that the data stays on that specific browser and device. If you switch computers or clear your browser data, the history will not follow you. For a personal reading project, that is usually acceptable, but it is worth knowing if you plan to read across multiple devices.
Because progress is page-based, the tracker does not record sections or minutes as progress. That is a deliberate choice. A book with many short sections, like Floyd's Flowers with its 106 text sections, might tempt you to count each story as a unit. But the tracker keeps the focus on pages, which are a more consistent measure across different editions. If you want to track by story or chapter, you would do that outside the tracker. For most readers, the page-based approach is simple and reliable, and the ability to adjust the total page count makes it adaptable to whatever edition you hold.