Neubook vs Lumen Reader
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Neubook
Read full descriptionHide full description
Neubook is a focused EPUB reader that helps you finish the books you start and discover your next great read. Most reading apps give you a wall of text. Neubook transforms every book into calm, bite-sized cards that you swipe through one at a time, making it easy to stay focused whether you're commuting, relaxing in bed, or reading during a quick break. Why Readers Love Neubook Read your way - Swipe through bite-sized cards, scroll naturally, or switch to **Focus Mode** to read one passage at a time. Bionic Reading - Subtly bolds the beginning of each word to help your eyes move more efficiently. Discover your next read - Browse books inside the app or turn any web article into a clean, distraction-free book you can read offline. Build a lasting habit - Stay motivated with daily goals, reading streaks, and a beautiful reading heatmap. Personalize your experience - Choose from themes like Dark, Sepia, Dark Academia, Midnight Gold, and more, with customizable fonts and elegant typography. Read in your language - Supports a wide range of languages and scripts, with bundled fonts for beautifully rendered regional-language books. Your library, your way - Import your own EPUBs, highlight passages, take notes, and listen with built-in text-to-speech. Offline and distraction-free - Enjoy an ad-free reading experience with your books available anytime, anywhere. Whether you're immersed in a novel, catching up on essays from your favorite writers, or finally finishing the book you've been meaning to read, Neubook makes reading feel effortless again. READ THE WEB LIKE A BOOK • Follow any blog or newsletter with RSS or pick from built-in suggestions • Paste any article link; Neubook strips the clutter and keeps the images • Articles are saved offline as books read on the subway, on a flight, anywhere • Your streak counts articles too. Five minutes of real reading is real reading. YOUR LIBRARY, ORGANIZED • Books and Articles side by side, with filters, tags, and collections • Covers, bylines, and reading progress for everything Download Neubook today and rediscover the joy of focused reading. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://neubook.app/privacy
Lumen Reader
Read full descriptionHide full description
Lumen Reader turns any webpage, EPUB, PDF, or DOCX into a clean audiobook with on-device narration, lock-screen controls, and word-by-word highlights. Paste a link, tap Listen — no ads, no account, no subscription. PASTE A LINK. GET AN AUDIOBOOK. Found a 10,000-word essay you'd never sit down to read? An hour-long blog post? A web-novel chapter buried under five ad slots? Paste the URL into Lumen. The page is stripped of pop-ups, trackers, cookie walls, newsletter dialogs, and "related articles" carousels — then handed to a natural narrator that starts reading aloud while you keep walking, cooking, or driving. POCKET AUDIO PLAYER Lumen feels like a podcast app, not a reading app, when you want it to. The big Listen button is on every book and every imported article. Lock-screen controls let you play, pause, scrub, skip back 15 s, or jump chapter without unlocking your phone. AirPods double-tap, CarPlay, Dynamic Island, and Bluetooth headphones all work out of the box. Background audio keeps the narrator going when the screen is off. OR READ INSTEAD The same content is also a beautifully typeset, minimalist reader. Three themes (Dark, Sepia, Light) and four type families (Georgia serif, sans, rounded, OpenDyslexic) tuned for multi-hour sessions. Sentence-granular highlights in five colours, per-chapter bookmarks, and a notes catalog searchable across every book. A soft amber word-highlight scrolls along the page in time with the audio when you read and listen at the same time. BUILT-IN LIBRARY Open the app and there's already something to read or listen to. A curated catalog of public-domain titles is one tap away: • The Holy Bible (King James Version) • The Holy Qur-ān (public-domain English translation) • The Bhagavad Gita • The Dhammapada · Tao Te Ching · Analects of Confucius • Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) · The Art of War · Walden • Pride and Prejudice · Frankenstein · Dracula · Moby-Dick • Sherlock Holmes · Alice in Wonderland · The Iliad & The Odyssey • …plus developer docs (Snowflake, Databricks) rendered on-device. Books download straight from canonical archives like Project Gutenberg in seconds — no account, yours forever. YOUR OWN FILES TOO Drop EPUB, PDF, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, or HTML in from Files, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive. Lumen parses chapters into the same clean reader and audiobook UI. ONE LIBRARY ON EVERY DEVICE iCloud syncs your reading progress, highlights, notes, and imported books across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro — silently, with no login. Start a chapter on your phone, finish it on your iPad with the audio resuming at the exact word. OFFLINE BY DEFAULT Every page and audio session is generated on-device. Once a book is downloaded, you never need a signal to re-open it. PRIVACY No account. No analytics. No tracking. Highlights, notes, and progress stay in your own iCloud — never on our servers. The app talks only to the page you explicitly paste, or runs entirely offline against the bundled library. FINE PRINT Every catalog title is public domain or permissively licensed. Lumen does not bundle copyrighted prose and does not redistribute from its own servers — downloads go straight from the canonical archive to your device. For pages or files you import, you're responsible for the rights. Read it. Hear it. Pocket it.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Lumen Reader at none against Neubook's 2. Lumen Reader also leads on update cadence (every 4 days vs every 11 days). Neubook's advantage is iOS requirement (15.0 vs 26.0). 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. Neubook sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month. Lumen Reader asks for nothing beyond the download.
Neubook ships an update every 11 days, Lumen Reader every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on August 21, 2026 and September 8, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Neubook | Lumen Reader |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 11 days | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 99 MB | 98 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Bibin Mathew | SAMANTH GURRAM |
In-app purchases
Neubook
- Neubook Plus$4.991 Month
- Neubook Plus$39.991 Year
Lumen Reader
No in-app purchases









