Lumen Reader vs Silt

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.

Silt is a calm place to think on the page. It's built for two kinds of writing — essays and journaling — and for the reading that feeds them. Choose your intent and the room changes to suit it: an open canvas for an essay, a quiet daily page for a journal, a focused reader for a book. Most writing apps forget what you've read. Silt doesn't. As you write, it brings the relevant lines from your reading alongside the paragraph you're working on — so the right quote or idea is there when you reach for it. WRITE WITH INTENTION • Start from a prompt — "What are you here to think about?" — not a blank page. • Separate modes for drafting and revising: get the words down first, shape them later. • Every paragraph keeps its own version history. Try a line three ways and never lose the one you liked. • Set a gentle deadline and a daily writing reminder. A LIVING READING CORPUS • Bring in highlights from Kindle and Obsidian, or highlight as you read inside Silt. • While you write, Silt surfaces the passages that match what you're saying, ranked by relevance. • Drop any highlight straight into your draft as a quote. READ INSIDE THE APP • Open your own PDFs and EPUBs in a clean, distraction-free reader. • Your books stay on your device. • Highlights you make flow back into your corpus, ready to resurface later. ONE LIBRARY, EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE • Notes, journal entries, highlights, and books — organized and searchable. • Light and dark, with accent colors you can tune to your taste. PRIVATE BY DESIGN • Your writing is end-to-end encrypted (AES-GCM-256). Only you hold the key. • Local-first: the app works fully offline, with no account required. • Optional sync keeps your work in step across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Silt runs natively on iPhone, iPad, and Mac — one app, all your devices. Writing settles like sediment, layer on layer, until something solid forms. Silt is where it settles.