Back in the 90s, we had a client that needed to know that each person had read a document without them clicking to sign or anything.
The initial solution was to add each name to a text field on a separate tracking document. This ran into problems when it got over 32k real fast. Then, one of my colleagues realized you could just have it create a document for each user to record that they'd read it.
Heck, you could have one database used to track all reads for all users of all documents, since one user can only open one document at a time -- each time they open a new document, either add that value to a field or create a field named after the document they've read on their own "reader tracker" document.
Or you could make that a mail-in database, so no worries about replication. Each time they open a document for which you want to track reads, it create a tiny document that has only their name and what document they read which gets mailed into the "read counter database". If you don't care who read it, you have an agent that runs on a schedule that updates the count and deletes the mailed-in documents.
There really are a lot of ways to skin this cat.