Lumen Reader vs Novel Tracker
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Lumen Reader
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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.
Novel Tracker
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Keep a small reading library in the browser, lets readers reopen the exact chapter where they stopped, and keeps chapter history so accidental backtracking can be corrected. Features - Save the current chapter URL from the active browser tab. - Capture novel title, source site, chapter label, cover image URL, and reading status. - Automatically update tracked novels when matching chapter URLs change. - Browse, search, sort, edit, delete, and reopen novels from the library page. - Keep a per-novel chapter history trail. - Export and import JSON backups. - Work without an account and keep reading data local to the browser profile. - Optionally sign in with Google to synchronize through the Novel Tracker API.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Lumen Reader at every 4 days against Novel Tracker's every 10 days. Novel Tracker's advantage is device support (4 vs 2) and iOS requirement (15.0 vs 26.0). On price, ads and in-app purchases 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. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Lumen Reader ships an update every 4 days, Novel Tracker every 10 days. Both last shipped on October 31, 2026.
| Parameter | Lumen Reader | Novel Tracker |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 4 days — better | Every 10 days |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 26.0 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 98 MB | 1 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | SAMANTH GURRAM | Biswash Ghimire |
In-app purchases
Lumen Reader
No in-app purchases
Novel Tracker
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Lumen Reader free?
Is Novel Tracker free?
Do Lumen Reader or Novel Tracker have ads?
Which is updated more often, Lumen Reader or Novel Tracker?
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