Reading statistics for stock PocketBook e-readers. The firmware records what you read and when you last touched it; this app turns that into a stats screen, built from the firmware's own UI components.
Developed and tested on a PocketBook Verse (PB629), firmware U629.6.10.1461. Other Allwinner B288/B300 readers on Qt 6.8 firmware should work, but none has been tried.
Overview · calendar · one day's breakdown. Screenshots from a PB629 set to Russian; the app follows the device language.
- Overview — three sections. Current book: cover, progress, and how long is left at your own measured pace. Today: minutes read and pages per hour. All books: books finished and hours in total.
- Calendar — a month at a time, each day carrying the cover of what you read most. Tap a day for the breakdown, a book for its detail.
Every figure is something that was measured. Nothing is inferred from the size of your library.
The ⓘ in the header holds the version, the update button and one setting. The screens re-read their figures when you come back from a book, so what you just read is already there.
A daemon in the same binary reads the firmware's library database — read-only, every 30 seconds — and turns movements of your reading position into sessions. The firmware saves your position only every so often, so one stretch of clock can hold both the reading and the hours the cover lay shut: it is credited only as far as the pages turned across it make plausible — at most five minutes a page — and the time the reader spent asleep is subtracted before that. Jumping is not reading: following a footnote to the back of the book, or returning to a bookmark, buys neither minutes nor pages, and what you read from where you land is counted from there. Sessions split at local midnight, so one day's figures are that day's.
Nothing starts at boot: the firmware has no place for that outside its own partition. Instead, ⓘ offers to track from the moment a book opens — the app registers itself as the handler for EPUB, FB2 and PDF, starts the daemon when you open a book and hands the book straight to the usual reader. With that off, open the app once after switching the reader on.
Time missed while the daemon was down is reconstructed from the firmware's timestamps, capped, and marked as an estimate: it counts toward total hours but never toward averages. Days before the install date are drawn as unknown rather than as days without reading. "Finished" always means the firmware's own mark as read flag.
Covers are extracted from the book files themselves — EPUB, FB2, CBZ — when the firmware's cache is wrong, and kept in the app's own cache, which is why a finished book still has a thumbnail after you delete the file. The interface follows the device language across 29 of them.
If something goes wrong, system/pocketbook-statistics/app.log has it: the app
and its daemon both write there, one line per event. The ⓘ screen shows the last
lines of it when an update fails; otherwise read the file over USB.
Nothing is uploaded: no account, no telemetry. The app reads the firmware's
database and writes its own files under system/pocketbook-statistics/. One
request goes out, to api.github.com, and only when you press Check for
update.
- Download the
.zipfrom the latest release and unpack it. - Copy
PocketBookStatistics.apptoapplications/on the reader over USB. - Eject, open the app once, then reboot so the launcher icon appears.
Updating afterwards is ⓘ → Check for update. To uninstall, delete the .app,
restore view.json from the backup beside it, and delete
system/pocketbook-statistics/.
One ARM binary, app and daemon in one, linking the Qt 6.8.2 already on the
reader. make sdk once, then make qt; make test runs the host-side tests.
Details in BUILDING.md, the firmware's data in
docs/DEVICE-DATA.md.
To nikljuel for better-stats, which is where the idea came from: it showed that reading statistics on stock PocketBook firmware were possible at all. This app was written after studying how that one works, with the emphasis put elsewhere — its own session tracking, and a daemon that starts by itself when a book is opened.
MIT — see LICENSE. Bundles SQLite and miniz; cross-compilation builds on fstanis/pocketbook-sdk-qt6. Not affiliated with PocketBook — third-party software on your reader, at your own risk.