Lumen Reader vs Earmark Audiobooks

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.

Your audiobooks. Your files. Your place in the story. Earmark brings your MP3s, M4Bs and other audio files into a personal audiobook library. Listen from folders in Files or iCloud Drive, stream from your NAS, or download books for offline listening. No account, subscription or ads. SETTLE INTO A GOOD BOOK • Adjust playback from 0.5x to 3x with natural pitch and a speed remembered for each book. • Jump between chapters, skip back or forward, and save bookmarks. • Fall asleep with a timer, including an end-of-chapter option. • Pick up the thread with smart rewind after a pause. • Control playback from the lock screen and CarPlay's Now Playing screen. • Save listening presets for the way you like to listen. A SHELF THAT MAKES SENSE Browse by author, series or folder, and search your collection. Earmark uses file tags and folder names to group tracks into books, including multi-disc folders. Find duplicates, adjust book groupings, and put tracks in the right order. Save smart lists and see new arrivals without losing your place. AT HOME OR ON THE ROAD Connect an SMB share to browse your NAS alongside local books. Stream while your server is reachable, or prepare books for an offline trip. Reconnect a moved library and back up your library state to keep your organization and listening progress safe. YOUR COLLECTION STAYS YOURS Playing a book leaves its audio files where they are. Downloads, moves into Earmark and uploads to your NAS happen only when you request them. Bring your own audiobooks; no catalog or books are included. Free and open source. No analytics, donation prompts or rating nags. Source code: github.com/vanities/earmark Supported audio: MP3, M4A, M4B, AAC, WAV, AIFF, CAF and FLAC.