Serial Reader vs Book Tracker
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
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.
- Daily book installments
- Over 900 classic books
- Serialize your own EPUBs
- Sync with Goodreads/Readwise
- Word lookup
- Reading streaks and badges
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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!
Book Tracker
Capture, organize, and revisit key passages from your books with advanced text recognition. Create collections, add tags and notes, and easily export your highlights. Stop forgetting what you read and make your reading more impactful.
- Text recognition
- Book collections
- Tags and notes
- Highlight export
- Page number detection
- Search functionality
- Photo highlighting
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Remember more of what you read. Turn the passages that matter into a personal library you can search, revisit, and share. Point your camera at a book page, select the text, and save it with your notes, tags, and page number. Keep your books organized, return to favorite ideas with reminders and widgets, and recap a book’s core ideas from your own highlights with Apple Intelligence. CAPTURE • Capture text with your camera or from photos in your library • Select sentences and paragraphs with smart text recognition • Automatically select text you’ve highlighted or underlined in a book • Save multiple highlights from a page at once • Detect page numbers and scan ISBN barcodes to add books • Import highlights from Kindle or CSV files • Import your book library from Goodreads or other CSV files • Drag and drop images to capture highlights on iPad ORGANIZE • Build your personal bookshelf with collections and reading status • Group highlights into chapters and browse them in reading order • Add notes, tags, page numbers, and favorites • Add emphasis with bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough • Find relevant tags faster with smart suggestions • Search your highlights and filter by book, collection, or tag REVISIT • Recap a book’s core ideas from your highlights with Apple Intelligence • Rediscover saved passages with recurring highlight reminders • Keep highlights on your Home Screen with widgets • Start highlighting with Siri Shortcuts • Capture and browse your highlights offline SHARE & EXPORT • Share highlights as beautiful quote cards • Publish a book’s highlights as a web page anyone can read • Export one book or your whole library • Choose PDF, Markdown, CSV, RTF, or plain text • Include notes, tags, and page numbers in your exports FREE TO START Capture and organize unlimited books and highlights for free. Highlighted+ adds automatic selection of marked text, Apple Intelligence recaps, Kindle and CSV highlight import, whole-library export, custom reminders, and more. Apple Intelligence features depend on device, language, and system availability. Selected as Apple’s App of the Day 6 times. Trusted by 160,000+ readers. ABOUT ME I'm Damir, an independent creator from Europe who loves to read. Say hello at damir.stuhec@gmail.com Privacy Policy: https://highlighted-app.webflow.io/terms-and-policies#privacy-policy-heading Terms: https://highlighted-app.webflow.io/terms-and-policies#terms-of-service-heading
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Book Tracker at every 5 weeks against Serial Reader's every 3 months. Serial Reader's advantage is ratings volume (4.1K vs 750) and iOS requirement (15.6 vs 18.4). On price, rating, review sentiment and ads 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
Both are free to download. Serial Reader sells 5 one-off in-app purchases and Book Tracker sells 6 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.8 for Serial Reader against 4.9 for Book Tracker. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Serial Reader has 4.1K ratings behind it against 750, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews are what separate them: 95% of Serial Reader's written reviews are positive against 93% of Book Tracker's.
Serial Reader ships an update every 3 months, Book Tracker every 5 weeks. The most recent releases landed on November 1, 2026 and November 2, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Serial Reader | Book Tracker |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (4.1K ratings) | 4.9 (750 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 95.2% of reviews — better | 92.8% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 4.1K — better | 750 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 months | Every 5 weeks — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Freemium | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.6 — better | 18.4 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 29 MB | 72 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Michael Schmitt | Damir Stuhec |
Customer experience
Serial Reader
Book Tracker
User reviews
Serial Reader
From 4.1K App Store ratingsWhat 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
Book Tracker
From 750 App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 👍 Simple and easy to use
- 🚀 Accurate text recognition
- 💡 Useful for readers and students
- 🔖 Allows organizing highlights by book and tags
- 🔒 No ads or in-app purchases
Room to improve
- 🐛 Issues with text ordering and formatting
- 🔍 Limited search and filtering options
- 📱 Needs offline support and sync capabilities
- 🖌️ Lack of formatting options for highlights
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
Book Tracker
Reported bugs
3 issues- Occasional crashes or freezes
- Issues with recognizing text from curved pages
- Problems with losing previously saved highlights
Requested features
5 requests- Add ability to highlight and annotate PDFs
- Integrate with ebook readers like Kindle
- Implement cloud sync and backup
- Add more customization options for highlights
- Improve search and filtering functionality
In-app purchases
Serial Reader
- Tip Jar - Essay$1.99
- Serial Premium$2.99
- Tip Jar - Short Story$4.99
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- Tip Jar - Novel$9.99
- Tip Jar - Epic$14.99
Book Tracker
- Highlighted Club Monthly$2.991 Month
- plus weekly$4.997 Days
- plus yearly3 Days trial$44.991 Year
- Small tip$9.00
- Medium tip$25.00
- Large tip$49.00









