# Lector: Read Aloud — Offline. Private. One price.

> Offline. Private. One price. (iPhone/iPad app by Albert Collver.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/lector-read-aloud/id6809570852 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Albert Collver](https://appshunter.io/developer/6809570854)
- Category: Productivity, Books
- Price: Free with in-app purchases
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 17.0 · 3 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2026-09-14
- Data updated: 2026-10-09
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/lector-read-aloud/id6809570852/reviews.md

## What is Lector?

Lector turns your documents into speech, spoken by your iPhone, on your iPhone. Import a PDF, an EPUB, a Word document, RTF, Markdown, or plain text — or share an article straight from Safari — press play, and listen while your hands and eyes are busy: while you work, while you drive, while you walk the dog, while dinner cooks.

The name is Latin for reader. For two thousand years a lector has been the one who reads aloud so that others can attend to what they are doing — the appointed reader in church, the monk reading to a silent refectory, the hired reader on a platform above the cigar rollers of Havana and Tampa. Lector puts that old office in your pocket.

WHAT IT DOES
• Reads PDF, EPUB, Word (.docx), RTF, Markdown, and plain text
• Imports articles shared from Safari, and reads text you type or paste
• Highlights each sentence as it speaks and scrolls the page for you
• Turns a PDF's table of contents into real chapters, with a navigator to jump anywhere
• Exports any document — or a single chapter — to an M4A audio file
• Keeps reading in the background, with Dynamic Island and Lock Screen controls
• Six Siri and Shortcuts actions: play, pause, resume, stop, next, previous
• Sleep timer, speed control, voice favorites, light and dark appearance
• Honors large Dynamic Type sizes throughout

VOICES
Lector speaks with Apple's voices, generated entirely on the device. Every voice installed on your iPhone appears in the app, grouped by language, with your favorites pinned to the top. One recommendation: download an Enhanced or Premium voice (Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices). They are free, and they are markedly closer to a human reader.

PRIVATE BY ARCHITECTURE
No account. No analytics. No server. Documents are read and spoken on the phone and never uploaded anywhere — there is no backend to upload them to. The privacy label says Data Not Collected because that is simply true.

ONE PRICE, ONCE
Everything in Lector is free to use. The free library holds three imported documents at a time — delete one and the slot opens again — and typed text and shared articles never count against it. A single purchase removes the cap for good. Not per month, not per year — once. The developer was tired of apps that offered a three-day trial and then wanted a hundred and twenty dollars a year, so Lector is built the other way around: the free version is the full app, and the only thing money buys is a bigger bookshelf.

Requires iOS 17 or later.

## Pricing and in-app purchases

Base price: Free.

**One-time purchases**

| Purchase | Price | Type |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lector Unlimited | $9.99 | one-time |



## Version history (last 3 releases)

### 1.2 — 2026-09-19

• Your ebook server, in Lector. Connect to Calibre-Web or any OPDS library on your own network, then browse, search, and download your books.
• See the page. Show a PDF as printed, with the sentence being read highlighted on the page itself. Scanned PDFs too. Tap any line to start reading there.
• PDFs read in whole sentences. Lector no longer stops at the end of every printed line, and words hyphenated across lines are spoken whole. Re-import a PDF to get this.
• Keep listening from the library, with a now-playing bar, and find your past audio exports again.
• Fixes, including a freeze after Listen to Summary and a default voice that could be forgotten after an iOS update.

### 1.1 — 2026-09-17

Lector 1.1 — more to read, and a reader who prepares you.

• Summaries: touch and hold a document for a short overview to hear before it begins, with points to listen for — generated on your iPhone by Apple Intelligence, never sent anywhere.
• The Reader's Digest edition: the document condensed without losing the argument, saved as its own clearly labeled copy.
• Project Gutenberg: browse popular, latest, or random shelves — or search seventy thousand public-domain books — and download straight into your library.
• Add a web page by address; the readable article is saved to your library.
• Scanned PDFs are now read with on-device text recognition.
• Spoken abbreviations: Dr., Gen. 1, and ACT IV are read as Doctor, Genesis 1, and Act 4. A switch in voice settings turns this off.
• Sepia, the third reading appearance.
• Play, pause, and skip from the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island.
• Cleaner sentence breaks around citations, and files with odd or missing extensions now import.

### 1.0 — 2026-09-14

No release notes.

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## More apps by Albert Collver

- [Listen Queue](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/listen-queue/id6815400047)

All apps by Albert Collver: https://appshunter.io/developer/6809570854

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-10-09.*