Because it is worthless.

Again the easy thing to measure is the wrong thing. If the student read the material from this ebook has not a thing in a the world to do with the student knowing the material or not. He may have learned it in the past, he may read another book about the subject or hacked the ebook so he could read it on another device.

The danger here is substituting the easy to measure metric "Pages Read" for the much tougher "Material Understood".

Do man boobs count?

Data mining with Rattle and R .... http://rattle.togaware.com/

Most librarians were probably not math majors, and are unlikely to be expert in statistics. But if you can work your way through the book, you may get enough insight into your data to ask good questions from a local Math department. No doubt some graduate student(s) can get a paper out of it, or at least some applied class project credit.

But if you don't understand what it is you are looking for, you probably won't coax them into figuring out what questions you ought to be asking. So start with the book.

While a free version is on the site, support the work by buying a hardcopy for the library ;>

You're not suggesting a complex open-source application that will require intensive work and special skills to implement to solve a basic task? You must be new around here.

I suggest you post your question to the code4lib mailing list. It's going to get you much more informed and practical advice. You might even find some people who already have a good workflow who will share their tools.

-Esme