EPUB Reader vs Episteme
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
EPUB Reader
This app offers a versatile reading experience for various digital formats, including EPUB, PDF, comics, and audiobooks. It provides extensive customization options for typography, color themes, and reader controls, ensuring a personalized and comfortable reading environment. The app also supports seamless library management and synchronization across devices.
- Supports EPUB, PDF, CBZ, CBR, and audiobooks
- Customizable typography and color themes
- Read aloud functionality with offline neural voices
- Syncs reading position with e-readers
- Organized library with instant search and metadata detection
- Highlighting, note-taking, and export options
- Reading statistics and progress tracking
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EPUB, PDF, comics, and audiobooks in one native iOS reader. Fast, deeply customizable, and built to disappear so you can simply read. FOUR FORMATS, ONE SHELF Read EPUB 3 and PDF. Read CBZ and CBR comics and manga, with two-page spreads, double-tap zoom, and a reading direction you set per book. Listen to audiobooks with chapters, a sleep timer, Car Mode, and CarPlay. Or follow along with EPUB 3 narration, where the text highlights in time with the voice. READ ALOUD Any book can be read to you, by any Apple voice on your device or by natural neural voices in 31 languages that you download once and then run offline. The sentence highlights as it is spoken and the pages turn on their own, with speed presets, sentence skips, a sleep timer, and Lock Screen controls. Prepare a book in advance and keep listening with the screen off. TYPOGRAPHY YOU CONTROL 200+ fonts, or import your own. Tune size, weight, line and paragraph spacing, alignment, hyphenation, and separate margins for portrait and landscape. Save settings per book so a novel, a textbook, and poetry each look right. Build your own color themes and let them switch at sunset. Choose which buttons the reader toolbar shows and where a tap opens it, and give links their own color and style. Smart dark mode keeps images natural, and in-reader brightness, Line Focus, and eye-care break reminders protect your eyes. NO LOCK-IN, EVER Your books stay ordinary files in an ordinary folder, never a proprietary database. Point JustRead at any folder: on device, iCloud Drive, or one your cloud app syncs through Files. Import from a Calibre server or any OPDS catalog. Email a book to your Kindle or PocketBook. IN SYNC WITH YOUR E-READER Your reading position follows you to any e-reader running KOReader, a Kobo included, in both directions. Connect a self-hosted Grimmory server to browse and download its books, send books to it, and keep status, ratings, highlights, notes, and bookmarks in step both ways. A LIBRARY THAT SCALES Thousands of books with no lag, and a book opens in about a second. Instant search by title, author, or series. Automatic metadata and series detection, 11 sort modes, saved filters, collections, and tags. Edit any book's details by hand, description included. Spotlight opens any book from your home screen. HIGHLIGHTS, NOTES, BOOKMARKS Highlight, underline, and attach a note. Browse every highlight across your whole library in one place, share a quote as a card, or export to Markdown, PDF, or Readwise. YOUR READING, IN NUMBERS Daily goals, a yearly books goal, streaks, and milestone badges. An hourly heatmap shows when you read best. Monthly and yearly recaps, plus a story-style Reading Wrap that turns your year into cards worth sharing. AND THE REST Home screen and lock screen widgets. Dictionary and translation. Full-text search and a nested table of contents. iCloud sync, so you resume on the exact line on any device. Right-to-left and Japanese vertical text. A page curl, if you want one. Free for 14 days, then a subscription or a lifetime purchase, both with Family Sharing. Available in 21 languages. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://justread.app/en/privacy_policy
Episteme
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Episteme Reader is an offline-first, privacy-focused document and e-book reader. It supports PDF, EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, ODT/FODT, DOCX, Comics, Markdown, HTML, and plain text files. • Two Reading Modes Switch between a paginated view for a traditional book-like experience and continuous vertical scrolling for quick reading. Both modes work across all supported formats. • PDF Annotations Draw directly on PDF pages using pen, fountain pen, pencil, highlighter, and eraser tools. Add text boxes anywhere on a page with system or imported fonts. Annotated documents can be exported with full vector fidelity. • Custom Fonts Import your own font files (.ttf, .otf) and use them while reading any ebook format. Embedded book fonts and system fonts are also fully supported. • Text Selection & Search Select, copy, and search text across all formats. Full-text search with background indexing for large documents. built-in OCR support for scanned or image-based PDFs. • Text-to-Speech Listen to any document using your device's TTS engine. • Smart Tools (Pro) Get context-aware dictionary definitions for words and phrases. Generate concise summaries of chapters or pages to quickly understand complex material. • Library & Organization Manage your collection with custom shelves and collections. Sort by title, author, or reading progress. Jump back into recent books instantly. • Local Folder Sync Point Episteme at a folder on your device to automatically import and track books. • Privacy Episteme is designed to work entirely offline. No account is needed for any core feature. AI-powered\online features process data securely in memory without storing any user content.
Screenshots
Verdict
EPUB Reader and Episteme are too close to call on the numbers: across 6 compared parameters — price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.
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. EPUB Reader sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month and Episteme sells 5 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
EPUB Reader ships an update every 5 days, Episteme every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on November 11, 2026 and November 10, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | EPUB Reader | Episteme |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.7 (60 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 83.3% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 60 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 5 days | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Freemium | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.1 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 217 MB | 102 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 12+ |
| Developer | PETR JAHODA | Aryan Raj |
In-app purchases
EPUB Reader
- Monthly Premium$4.991 Month
- Yearly Premium$29.991 Year
- Lifetime Premium$79.99
Episteme
- Wallet Top-Up $1$0.99
- Wallet Top-Up $5$4.99
- Episteme Pro$5.99
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- Wallet Top-Up $10$9.99
- Wallet Top-Up $20$19.99








