Comparison

Serial Reader vs Gutenberg | eBook Reader

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Serial Reader

Read classic literature in daily, manageable segments. This app breaks down over 900 books into daily issues, each readable in 20 minutes or less, helping you build reading habits and tackle lengthy classics. Customize your reading experience with various themes, fonts, and sync options.

Highlights
  • Daily book installments
  • Over 900 classic books
  • Serialize your own EPUBs
  • Sync with Goodreads/Readwise
  • Word lookup
  • Reading streaks and badges
Features
Read full description

Read classic books in daily bite-sized bits!  Serial Reader helps you fit more reading into your busy life. Choose from more than 900 books — or add your own! — and the app delivers a new issue from the book every day. Build great reading habits and tackle daunting classic books. Each daily issue can be read in 20 minutes or less, making it easy to fit reading into your spare time! Picked as one of Apple's Best New Apps and Best New App Updates. "This free app will make you ridiculously well-read in 20 minutes a day" — Mashable "For those who are intimidated by thick, leather-bound tomes, Serial Reader is a good way to break it all down" — The Washington Post • Read hundreds of popular classic books for free • Large variety of themes & fonts • Serialize your own EPUB books • Sync to Goodreads and Readwise • Lookup words with quick dictionary & Wikipedia access • Earn fun badges and track your reading streaks Plus, with the Serial Premium upgrade: • Read tomorrow's issue early • Sync your reading across multiple devices • Save quotes & notes while reading • Save books to Read Later • Pause delivery of new issues • Pick specific delivery days and hours for new issues • Custom app icons "Serial Reader’s subscription format makes it a little bit more fun to crank through the classics" — Lifehacker "A useful tool that makes it easy in our modern world to make classic books part of your reading diet" — MacStories More than 900 books available in the app with new titles added each week. Every book is free to read! A preview of available books: Most Popular • Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen • A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens • The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald • Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky • War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy • Les Misérables - Victor Hugo • The Time Machine - H.G. Wells • The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde • The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway American Lit • Moby-Dick - Herman Melville • Little Women - Louisa May Alcott • My Antonia - Willa Cather • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain Adventure • The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas • Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson • Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe • The Odyssey - Homer • King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard Romance • Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte • Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy • Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare Science Fiction • The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne • A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs Horror • Dracula - Bram Stoker • The Dunwich Horror - H.P. Lovecraft • Frankenstein - Mary Shelley • The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allan Poe • The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers • The Wendigo - Algernon Blackwood Mystery • The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle • The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie • The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins Biography • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass • Twelve Years a Slave - Solomon Northup Children's • Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll • The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame • Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery Fantasy • The Well at the World's End - William Morris • Time and the Gods - Lord Dunsany • The Wood Beyond the World - William Morris Philosophy • The Republic - Plato • Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes • Rights of Man - Thomas Paine Nonfiction • Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft • On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin • The Federalist Papers • The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels Westerns • Riders of the Purple Sage - Zane Grey • The Virginian - Owen Wister • Gunman's Reckoning - Max Brand Religion • King James Bible • The Dhammapada • The Quran Build great reading habits and finish classic books in days with Serial Reader!

About

Gutenberg | eBook Reader

Access a vast library of public domain e-books and audiobooks from around the world. Explore tens of thousands of titles across numerous languages and categories, including classics and popular works.

Highlights
  • Vast public domain e-book library
  • Extensive audiobook collection
  • Thousands of titles available
  • Multiple languages supported
  • Categorized book selection
  • Top 50 e-books listed
Features
Read full description

This app contains the largest public domain e-book and audio book platforms in the world. This application brings a large collection of e-books and audio books to your phone and makes more than 50.000 e-books, 10.000 audio books available for you. Thousands of books from different categories and languages. Languages with more than 50 e-books, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog. Top 50 e-books: 1- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 2- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 3- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 4- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens 5- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle 6- Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 7 -The Bayeux Tapestry Elucidated by John Collingwood Bruce 8- Why Men Fight by Bertrand Russell 9- Dracula by Bram Stoker 10- The Young Train Dispatcher by Burton Egbert Stevenson 11- Il Principe. English by Niccolò Machiavelli 12- Et dukkehjem. English by Henrik Ibsen 13- Beowulf: An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem 14- Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka 15- Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary 16- Rowlandson by Mary White Rowlandson 17- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 18- Grimms' Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm 19- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain 20- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes 21- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American 22- Slave by Frederick Douglass 23- Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie 24- Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin 25- The Iliad by Homer 26- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare 27- Red Wagon Stories by Wells Hawks 28- War and Peace by graf Leo Tolstoy 29- The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana by Vatsyayana 30- The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for 31- Serious People by Oscar Wilde 32- Common Sense by Thomas Paine 33- Histories of two hundred and fifty-one divisions of the 34- German army which participated in the war 35- The Romance of Lust: A Classic Victorian erotic novel by Anonymous 36- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 37- Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville 38- The War in the East by Trumbull White 39- Ulysses by James Joyce 40- Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë 41- The Key to Theosophy by H. P. Blavatsky 42- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse 43- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 44- The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4) by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 45- The Theory of Environment by Armin Hajman Koller 46- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo 47- The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin 48- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving 49- Webster & Tourneur by Cyril Tourneur and John Webster 50- Prestuplenie i nakazanie. English by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Top Audio Books: 1- Pride and Prejudice 2- Jane Eyre 3- Persuasion 4- Anne of Green Gables 5- Emma 6- Little Women 7- The Count of Monte Cristo 8- Mansfield Park 9- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 10- Wuthering Heights 11- The Woman in White 12- Frankenstein: The 1818 Text 13- A Little Princess 14- Moby-Dick 15- Sense and Sensibility 16- North and South 17- Dracula 18- The Scarlet PimpernelThe Scarlet Pimpernel 19- The 39 Steps 20- The Picture of Dorian Gray 21- Tess of the D'Urbervilles 22- David Copperfield 23- My Man Jeeves 24- The Invisible Man 25- A Christmas Carol 26- The Secret Garden 27- Northanger Abbey 28- Uncle Tom's Cabin 29- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 30- The Return of Sherlock Holmes 31- Middlemarch 32- A Room with a View 33- Agnes Grey 34- Wives and Daughters 35- Around the World in Eighty Days 36- The Metamorphosis 37- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 38- Don QuixoteDon Quixote 39- The Importance of Being Earnest 40- A Tale of Two Cities Terms of Use(EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Screenshots

Serial Reader4 screens
Gutenberg | eBook Reader4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is ads: Serial Reader at none against Gutenberg | eBook Reader's shown. Serial Reader also leads on review sentiment (95% vs 70%) and rating (4.8 vs 4.5). On price, update cadence, in-app purchases and monetization model there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Serial Reader sells 5 one-off in-app purchases and Gutenberg | eBook Reader sells 6 in-app purchases, starting at $1.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

Serial Reader holds the better App Store score, 4.8 against 4.5. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Serial Reader has 4.1K ratings behind it against 745, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 95% of Serial Reader's written reviews are positive against 70% of Gutenberg | eBook Reader's.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Serial Reader ships an update every 3 months, Gutenberg | eBook Reader every 6 weeks. The most recent releases landed on September 30, 2026 and September 28, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard4 real differences · 6 level
Serial Reader versus Gutenberg | eBook Reader: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterSerial ReaderGutenberg | eBook Reader
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.8 (4.1K ratings) — better4.5 (745 ratings)
Positive reviews94.9% of reviews — better69.7% of reviews
Number of ratings4.1K — better745
Update frequencyEvery 3 monthsEvery 6 weeks — better
AdsNo — betterYes
In-app purchasesYesYes
MonetizationFreemiumFree with in-app purchases
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPodiPhone, iPad, iPod
Requires iOS15.615.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size29 MB48 MB
Age rating12+4+
DeveloperMichael SchmittWebron Software LTD

Customer experience

Serial Reader

All ratings4,082 ratings
Positive97.3%
Neutral1.7%
Negative1.0%
Written reviews215 reviews
Positive94.9%
Neutral1.4%
Negative3.7%

Gutenberg | eBook Reader

All ratings745 ratings
Positive89.1%
Neutral3.0%
Negative7.9%
Written reviews66 reviews
Positive69.7%
Neutral6.1%
Negative24.2%

User reviews

Serial Reader

From 4.1K App Store ratings

What we love

  • 🚀 Bite-sized reading
  • 📚 Wide selection of classics
  • 👍 Simple and intuitive interface
  • 💰 Free with affordable premium upgrade
  • 🎉 Motivating achievements and badges

Room to improve

  • 🐛 Sync issues across devices
  • 🔍 Limited customization options
  • 🕰️ Inflexible delivery schedule
  • 🤔 Lack of modern/non-classic book selection

Gutenberg | eBook Reader

From 745 App Store ratings

What we love

  • 📚 Extensive collection of classic literature
  • 💰 Free access to thousands of books
  • 👍 Easy to use interface
  • 📖 Page-turning feature mimics physical books
  • 🌙 Night mode for comfortable reading

Room to improve

  • 🔍 Search function is unreliable and confusing
  • 📱 Poor book organization and browsing
  • 💔 Missing many books found on Project Gutenberg website
  • 📺 Excessive and intrusive advertisements
  • ⚙️ Limited customization options for book format

Bugs and requests

Serial Reader

Reported bugs

2 issues
  • App crashes when changing fonts
  • Issues with new chapter delivery not working

Requested features

4 requests
  • Add more modern/non-classic book options
  • Improve sync functionality across devices
  • Allow more customization of reading experience
  • Provide flexible delivery schedule options

Gutenberg | eBook Reader

Reported bugs

7 issues
  • Search returns no results or irrelevant results
  • Books listed on Project Gutenberg not appearing in app
  • App fails to download certain books
  • Reading progress not saved between sessions
  • Continuous scroll instead of page-by-page display
Show 2 more
  • Search function completely non-functional for some users
  • App crashes or becomes unresponsive

Requested features

10 requests
  • Improved search functionality with better filtering
  • Better book organization and categorization system
  • Dictionary/word definition feature
  • Improved paragraph spacing and text formatting
  • Page-by-page navigation instead of chapter-based
Show 5 more
  • Ability to delete books from library
  • Bookmark and reading progress saving
  • More non-fiction and contemporary book titles
  • Author search by first and last name
  • Reduced or optional advertisements

In-app purchases

5 purchases

Serial Reader

One-time5
  • Tip Jar - Essay$1.99
  • Serial Premium$2.99
  • Tip Jar - Short Story$4.99
Show 2 more
  • Tip Jar - Novel$9.99
  • Tip Jar - Epic$14.99
6 purchases

Gutenberg | eBook Reader

Subscriptions4
  • Monthly Subscription$1.991 Month
  • Weekly Subscription$4.997 Days
  • Weekly Subscription3 Days trial$4.997 Days
Show 1 more
  • Yearly Subscription$24.991 Year
One-time2
  • Premium$39.99
  • Lifetime Premium$39.99

Questions

Is Serial Reader free?
Serial Reader is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Gutenberg | eBook Reader free?
Gutenberg | eBook Reader is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Which has better reviews, Serial Reader or Gutenberg | eBook Reader?
Serial Reader is rated higher. Serial Reader averages 4.8 out of 5 from 4.1K ratings, while Gutenberg | eBook Reader averages 4.5 from 745 ratings.
Do Serial Reader or Gutenberg | eBook Reader have ads?
Gutenberg | eBook Reader shows ads; Serial Reader does not.
Which is updated more often, Serial Reader or Gutenberg | eBook Reader?
Serial Reader ships an update every 3 months, and Gutenberg | eBook Reader every 6 weeks. Most recently, Serial Reader was updated on September 30, 2026 and Gutenberg | eBook Reader on September 28, 2026.

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