EPUB Reader vs Athene Reader
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
EPUB Reader
Customize your reading experience with extensive font and layout options. Effortlessly manage your library, track reading habits, and enjoy eye-care features. Sync your books across devices via cloud storage without proprietary lock-in.
- 200+ built-in fonts and custom font import
- Adjustable text and layout settings
- Smart dark mode with intelligent image inversion
- 20-20-20 eye health reminders
- Library management for 5,000+ books
- Cloud sync via iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive
- Highlighting, notes, and bookmarking
- Reading progress tracking and goal setting
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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 18 languages. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://justread.app/en/privacy_policy
Athene Reader
Organize and read your digital books from various sources. Customize your reading experience with adjustable fonts, colors, and layouts. Listen to your books, take notes, and even ask questions about the content with an AI assistant.
- Import books from various sources
- Customizable reading interface
- Text-to-speech functionality
- Note-taking and highlighting
- AI-powered content questions
- Offline dictionary
- iCloud Sync
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Athene is a reader for the books you already own. Bring your books from Files, from Mail, from your computer over Wi‑Fi, from a link, or from anywhere that can share a file, and they go on a shelf that looks like one. EPUB and PDF open as they are; MOBI, AZW3, Word, FB2, TXT and HTML files become books as they arrive. Free classics from Project Gutenberg are a tap away. If you keep your library on a calibre server, Athene browses that shelf too — on your home network, or from anywhere through your own VPN such as Tailscale. THE PAGE Open a book and the app steps back. Just the page, on white, sepia or night paper, or paper in any colour you like, in the typeface and size you read best, including any Google Font. Highlight a passage, add a note, drop a bookmark, and find them all again under Marks. The shelf itself follows the time of day — Morning, Sunset, Night — or stays on the one you pick. NOTES YOU CAN DRAW Type a note in the margin, or sketch in it. On a PDF, mark up the page itself with Apple Pencil. LISTEN Any book, read aloud in a warm, natural voice that runs entirely on your device, and keeps reading with the screen locked. The voice is a one-time download of about 242 MB. A DICTIONARY Select a word to see what it means and how to say it. It is built in, and it works offline. ASK THE PAGE Tap the owl while you read and ask about what is in front of you. Who is she again? What did that word mean? What just happened? The Owl answers from the pages around where you are — this chapter at most, never the whole book, never your other books — and if the pages do not say, it tells you that instead of guessing. YOUR MODEL, YOUR CHOICE On a device with Apple Intelligence, the Owl thinks on the device and nothing you ask is sent anywhere. Or point it at your own Ollama server on your own network. Or bring a key from Claude, OpenRouter or OpenAI. Athene asks before the first question leaves the device, names the address it would send to, and remembers your answer. ON EVERY DEVICE Turn on iCloud Sync and your place, highlights, notes, drawings, collections and reading settings follow you between your iPhone and iPad. It goes only to your own private iCloud, and what you wrote is encrypted on your device first. With a calibre server, your highlights and how far you've read can go back to your calibre library too. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION Athene has no account, no analytics and no servers of its own. Your books, your notes and your questions stay on your device or go only where you have pointed them. The privacy policy says the same, in plain words. FREE Reading is free. No account, no subscription, no limit: the shelf, the reader, Listen, the dictionary, the Owl, iCloud Sync, your calibre server, your highlights and notes. Nothing in Athene is for sale. Athene requires iOS 26. The on-device Owl requires Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro and later, M-series iPad, iPad mini A17 Pro); on other devices the Owl works with your own Ollama server or an API key.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Athene Reader at none against EPUB Reader's 7. Athene Reader also leads on update cadence (every 2 days vs every 5 days). EPUB Reader's advantage is rating (4.7 vs 4.3) and ratings volume (47 vs 6). On price, review sentiment, ads and device support 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. EPUB Reader sells 7 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Athene Reader asks for nothing beyond the download.
EPUB Reader holds the better App Store score, 4.7 against 4.3. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: EPUB Reader has 47 ratings behind it against 6, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 87% of EPUB Reader's written reviews are positive against 80% of Athene Reader's.
EPUB Reader ships an update every 5 days, Athene Reader every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on October 11, 2026 and October 5, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | EPUB Reader | Athene Reader |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.7 (47 ratings) — better | 4.3 (6 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 86.8% of reviews — better | 80.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 47 — better | 6 |
| Update frequency | Every 5 days | Every 2 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.1 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 123 MB | 36 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | PETR JAHODA | Aditya Sreedhar |
Customer experience
EPUB Reader
Athene Reader
In-app purchases
EPUB Reader
- Monthly Premium14 Days trial$2.991 Month
- Monthly: Read Aloud Offline$4.991 Month
- Yearly – Launch Price7 Days trial$12.491 Year
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- Yearly Premium14 Days trial$24.991 Year
- Yearly: Highlights & Notes$29.991 Year
- Lifetime – Launch Price$29.99
- Lifetime: Library & Kindle$79.99
Athene Reader
No in-app purchases








