Leaf & Spine vs Afterglow
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Leaf & Spine
Enhance your reading experience with a distraction-free app that supports various formats like PDFs, EPUBs, audiobooks, and comics. Build daily reading habits with powerful tools, track your progress with detailed analytics, and personalize your digital library.
- Supports PDF, EPUB, CBR, CBZ, and Audiobooks
- Smart EPUB annotation and note-taking
- Text-to-Speech for audiobooks
- Customizable themes and 3D bookshelf
- Daily reading habit tracking and analytics
- Immersive focus sessions with ambient environments
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Your library, your shelf, your reading habit. Leaf & Spine is a calm, distraction-free home for your EPUBs, PDFs, comics and audiobooks. Arrange them on a 3D bookshelf, read with highlights, notes and drawings, listen with the screen off, and watch a daily reading habit take shape. Read for free, or upgrade to Premium for stats, focus sessions, backups and your own servers. BRING IN YOUR BOOKS • Read EPUB, PDF, CBZ and CBR, and listen to audiobooks. Audiobooks require Premium. • Add a whole folder at once, or pick files yourself. • Discover free public-domain books and audiobooks from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and LibriVox. • Connect your own server (Premium): Calibre, Calibre-Web, Kavita, Komga, Audiobookshelf, or a WebDAV folder such as Nextcloud or a NAS. Browse it, search it as you type, and download books to read offline. READ YOUR WAY • Highlight, take notes, draw with pen, pencil and highlighter, and look words up in the dictionary or translator. • Listen: the page is read aloud with the sentence lit up, using natural voices made on your device, and an EPUB that comes with a recording plays the narrator. • Focus mode for reading a sentence at a time, and a reading ruler. • Presets, typefaces (including Atkinson Hyperlegible and OpenDyslexic), heading styles and page-turn speed. Premium readers can import their own fonts. AUDIOBOOKS THAT KEEP PLAYING • Keep listening with your phone locked or while you use another app, with play, pause and skip on the lock screen. • Chapters, bookmarks, notes, speed and a sleep timer that works with the screen off. ORGANISE YOUR SHELF • A 3D bookshelf with categories, sub-categories, tags and series, sorted and grouped by author or series, with bookends you can fold into a box set. • Spines take their colour from each book's cover, or customise spines, patterns and covers yourself. • A page for every book: progress, the next in its series, description, chapters and your marks. • Fix a book's details, or fill them in from Open Library (Premium). • The Notebook gathers every highlight, note, drawing and looked-up word from your whole library, and one search covers it all. BUILD A HABIT • Goals in minutes a day or days a week, reminders at a time you choose, and streak freezes so one missed day doesn't erase months. • Home follows the series you are reading, and finishing a book offers the next one. • Home screen widgets with your current book and a highlight worth rereading. • Premium stats: time read and listened, pages, chapters, books finished, genres, highlights and words looked up, by week, month, year or all time. FOCUS SESSIONS (Premium) • Set a timer and read inside an immersive environment: a fireplace, a beach, a waterfall or a rainy window, each with its own ambience and music, which keep playing with the screen locked. YOUR PLACE, EVERYWHERE (Premium) • Back up automatically to iCloud or Google Drive, and keep your place across your devices. • Sync your progress with Audiobookshelf, Komga, Kavita and KOReader. PRIVATE BY DESIGN • No account or sign-up needed to start reading. • Your books, highlights, notes and progress stay on your device. Backups go to your own iCloud or Google Drive, never to our servers. • Six themes, light and dark (two free), and the app in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. PERFECT FOR • Students who highlight, draw and track study time. • Fiction readers who want EPUBs and audiobooks in one place. • Comic and manga readers with CBZ and CBR collections. • Anyone with a Calibre, Kavita, Komga or Audiobookshelf library. CONTENT NOTICE Leaf & Spine does not sell or host books. Discover lists free public-domain titles from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and LibriVox; everything else is your own files and your own servers. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Afterglow
Experience ebooks with a personalized ambiance. This reader intelligently creates unique themes from book cover art, offering a clean interface with customizable typography and layout for comfortable reading.
- Ebook reading interface
- Cover Tone themes
- Custom ambiance per book
- Typography controls
- Layout controls
- Light and dark modes
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A beautiful way to read ebooks. With Afterglow, give each book it's own ambience with Cover Tone themes, intelligently created from the book's cover art. Key features • Ebook reading with a clean, focused interface • Custom ambience for each book • Typography and layout controls for comfort and style • Light and dark reading options
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Afterglow at 5.0 against Leaf & Spine's 4.3. Afterglow also leads on in-app purchases (none vs 11) and update cadence (every 6 days vs every 2 weeks). Leaf & Spine's advantage is ratings volume (7 vs 1) and iOS requirement (15.5 vs 26.4). On price, 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. Leaf & Spine sells 11 in-app purchases, starting at $0.99 per month. Afterglow asks for nothing beyond the download.
Afterglow holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.3. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Leaf & Spine has 7 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Leaf & Spine ships an update every 2 weeks, Afterglow every 6 days. The most recent releases landed on October 25, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Leaf & Spine | Afterglow |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.3 (7 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 54.5% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 7 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 weeks | Every 6 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Freemium | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.5 — better | 26.4 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 119 MB | 14 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Aqeeb Rizwan | Mohammad Qureshi |
Customer experience
Leaf & Spine
Afterglow
In-app purchases
Leaf & Spine
- Premium Monthly7 Days trial$0.991 Month
- Premium Yearly7 Days trial$9.991 Year
- Teal Stripes$0.79
- Teal Labels$0.99
- Teal Hearts$0.99
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- Teal Duotone$0.99
- Teal Diamonds$1.49
- Teal Stars$1.49
- Teal Leaves$1.49
- Teal Spiral$1.99
- Premium Unlock$14.99
Afterglow
No in-app purchases









