Ebooks can tell which novels you didn't finish

The Goldfinch may have won Donna Tartt the Pulitzer, praised by judges as a novel which “stimulates the mind and touches the heart”, but the acclaimed title’s 800-odd pages appear to have intimidated British readers, with less than half of those who downloaded it from e-bookseller Kobo making it to the end.
New data from Kobo shows that, although The Goldfinch was the 37th bestselling ebook of the year for the retailer, it was completed by just 44.4% of Kobo’s British readers. Kobo speculated that it “likely proved daunting for some due to the length of the novel”.
Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s account from 1853 of how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery – “I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman’s chain was round me, and could not be shaken off” – was, according to Kobo, similarly overwhelming. Ninth on their British bestseller list, following the hugely successful film adaptation, the book was completed by just 28.2% of British readers.
The onset of digital reading means that Kobo – and other ebook retailers – are able to tell more than ever before about how readers engage with books: which they leave unopened, which they read to the end, and how quickly they finish.
Earlier this year, the American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg proposed the so-called “Hawking Index” in a blog for the Wall Street Journal, using Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature in an attempt to pinpoint how far into novels readers were actually getting, but retailers have been reluctant to share the data they are harvesting themselves. Kobo’s first analysis of trends in e-reading, released on Wednesday, reveal an unexpected divide between bestsellers, and the books that readers actually complete.
After collecting data between January and November 2014 from more than 21m users, in countries including Canada, the US, the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands, Kobo found that its most completed book of 2014 in the UK was not a Man Booker or Baileys prize winner. Instead, readers were most keen to finish Casey Kelleher’s self-published thriller Rotten to the Core, which doesn’t even feature on the overall bestseller list – although Kelleher has gone on to win a book deal with Amazon’s UK publishing imprint Thomas & Mercer after selling nearly 150,000 copies of her three self-published novels.
“Rotten to The Core by Casey Kelleher was the most completed book in the UK, with 83% of people reading it cover to cover,” said Kobo, “whereas the number one bestselling ebook in the UK, One Cold Night by Katia Lief [also a thriller] was only completed by 69% of those who read it.”
Kobo’s UK ebook bestseller list also features novels by major names including Gillian Flynn, John Green, James Patterson and Robert Galbraith, while its “most completed” list mixes romance, thrillers and erotica by the likes of Sylvia Day, Stella Rimington, Nora Roberts and Lynda La Plante. Kobo said that thriller powerhouse Patterson “was the most completed author in the UK for his entire portfolio of books”.
“A book’s position on the bestseller list may indicate it’s bought, but that isn’t the same as it being read or finished,” said Michael Tamblyn, president and chief content officer at Kobo. “A lot of readers have multiple novels on the go at any given time, which means they may not always read one book from start to finish before jumping into the next great story. People may wait days, months, or even until the following year to finish certain titles. And many exercise that inalienable reader’s right to set down a book if it doesn’t hold their interest.”
Kobo also revealed that the people of Britain were most likely to finish a romance novel, with 62% completion, followed by crime and thrillers (61%) and fantasy (60%). Italians were also most engaged by romance (74% completion), while the French preferred mysteries, with 70% completion.
Kobo’s UK Bestseller List
1.One Cold Night – Katia Lief
2. Gone Again – Doug Johnstone
3. Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn
4. The Fault in Our Stars – John Green
5. My Sister’s Keeper – Bill Benners
6. The Husband’s Secret – Liane Moriarty
7. The Cuckoo’s Calling – Robert Galbraith
8. Her Last Letter – Nancy C. Johnson
9. Twelve Years a Slave – Solomon Northup
10. Bloody Valentine – James Patterson
Kobo’s most completed books of 2014
1. Rotten to the Core - Casey Kelleher
2. The Tycoon’s Vacation – Melody Anne
3. The Traitor – Kimberley Chambers
4. Concealed in Death – JD Robb
5. Wrongful Death - Lynda La Plante
6. All Revved Up - Sylvia Day
7. Present Danger - Stella Rimington
8. The Empty Cradle - Rosie Goodwin
9. The Witness - Nora Roberts
10. The Promise (Fallen Star Series, Book 4) – Jessica Sorensen

Reading the Guardian first book award longlist: rewards and revelations

For the readers’ group helping to assess the 2014 contenders, it’s been a sometimes arduous but always enjoyable journey

'Vigorous debate' ...the first book award longlist. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
We started with Fiona McFarlane’s tiger on the coast of New South Wales and we finished eight weeks later in the company of the volatile “young skins” of Glanbeigh, having travelled to Colin Barrett’s fictional west of Ireland town via the new China with Evan Osnos, and from Kabul to London via Oxford, New York and Islamabad with Zia Haider Rahman. On the way we followed Gruff Rhys as he traced his farmhand ancestor’s search for a fabled tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans and we spent time with Marion Coutts, sharing her pain, frustration and love as her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, experienced the debilitating effects of a brain tumour.
The brain and its workings returned several times: Henry Marsh showed us what it was like to operate on its “soft white substance … moving through thought itself” while Matthew Thomas in his novel We Are Not Ourselves presented us with a closely observed study of what happens when Marsh’s “jelly” falls victim to dementia. We learnt new ways of interpreting architecture from Tom Wilkinson’s Bricks and Mortals, and encountered brilliant new approaches to the short story in May-Lan Tan’s Things To Make and Break, which made it to the longlist as the Guardian readers’ choice.

We were the six readers who made up this year’s Lewes readers’ group for the Guardian first book award. We’d been invited to take part in judging this year’s competition early in September, after applying to our local Waterstones, and for eight weeks the pile of 11 hardbacks we’d been presented with after joining the group dominated our reading lives. We’d read whenever and wherever we could, particularly in week four, when Lucie from Waterstones paired the dark novel After Me Comes the Flood with the emotionally draining memoir The Iceberg, and in Week six, when the 620 pages of We Are Not Ourselves tested our endurance while at the same time filling us with admiration for the skilled way in which Matthew Thomas steered us through his central characters’ experiences of marriage, ambition and loss.

The knowledge that the writers of these books had lots weighing on our choices meant that we took each book extremely seriously. There’s a £10,000 award for the winner, and all of the writers can be assured that as readers we held each book up to the light and discussed its strengths and weaknesses in full.

There were vigorous good-humoured debates about each of the 11 books on the longlist. We finished by ranking them at a meeting in the shop, watched over as we did so by less distinguished titles such as Dogs in Cars. We judged the books ultimately on how they had ranked as reading experiences. Style mattered, as did story; the fiction titles had to make us care about their characters and believe in the worlds they created, whilst the non-fiction ones needed to have a shape which gave coherence to their interests and concerns and make those concerns engage our attention and interest.

Some needed a little more editorial discipline in order to reign in their enthusiasm for lengthy footnotes or tortuous sub-plots. Strangely, given the rich variety of fiction and non-fiction we had to choose from, we didn’t disagree by much and our choices were satisfyingly mirrored in the shortlist published last Saturday. The shortlisted books don’t tell the whole story, however; no one reading In The Light of What We Know, with its epic coverage of nations breaking up and its searching exploration of love, science, faith and war, could feel that they were experiencing anything less than the arrival of a major new literary talent, and likewise the bizarre and mysterious world created by Sarah Perry in After Me Comes the Flood makes for a highly original and disturbing experience.

All that’s left for us now is to attend Wednesday’s award ceremony in London. We’ll enjoy being there and we’re all looking forward to a chance to meet the authors and find out who our fellow readers were. We know who we think deserves to win, and we’ll be glad to share in the celebrations, but we’ll miss our weekly meetings and we’ll miss the challenges that come with reading so many books in such a short time.

Watch out forthe result: the winner will have come through a really tough and demanding judging process and the first book award will be just one of many still to come!

• The winner is announced at 8pm. Peter Shears was part of the Lewes Waterstones reading group. With thanks to Lucie, Bridget, Anna, Barbara, Ian and Tessa