So how do you precisely read a byte? Easy: you ask for the pixel histogram of a raw image consisting of byte [i...i+1] of the file. And you get back something like
histogram: [0, 0, 1, 0, 0], [59.8, 59.9, 60.0, 60.1, 60.2]
Telling you that the byte is ASCII 60 ('<')