Leaf vs Athene Reader

Give your books a home of their own. Leaf brings beautiful EPUB reading and thoughtful library management together on iPhone and iPad. Import the DRM-free books you already own, make yourself comfortable, and pick up where you left off. READ YOUR WAY Choose from carefully selected fonts, including accessibility-friendly options. Adjust your reading theme and font size, or use Leaf Pro to import your own fonts and fine-tune typography and book formatting. Give individual books their own settings. On iPad, choose one column, two columns, or an automatic layout that adapts to the space available. Customize the reader's header and footer to keep the book and progress details you care about in view. KEEP THE PLACES THAT MATTER Save bookmarks as you read and return to them from the book's contents. See the surrounding text to remind yourself why you saved a place. With Leaf Pro, add personal notes to your bookmarks. A LIBRARY THAT FEELS LIKE YOURS Browse by author, series, and genre; search and sort your collection; and edit titles, authors, covers, descriptions, and more. Smart Shelves gather books by reading status and download availability. Leaf Pro adds custom shelves for your own collections. Rate books, mark favorites, and write down your thoughts when you finish. Leaf remembers reading time, completion dates, and the books you have finished this year, then helps you choose what comes next. PICK UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF Optional iCloud sync keeps your books, library details, and reading progress available across your iPhone and iPad using your own Apple Account. Keep a local library if you prefer. No Leaf account is required to import and read your books. Download books for offline reading, remove local copies when you need space, and return to your current book from the Home Screen widget. Read on an e-ink device too? With Leaf Pro, exchange reading positions for matching EPUBs with a compatible KOReader Sync server. Compare chapter titles and text previews before choosing a position. FIND YOUR NEXT BOOK Import EPUBs from Files or send them to Leaf from another app's share sheet. Browse and download public-domain books from the built-in Project Gutenberg Source, or start with the included classics from Standard Ebooks. Connect your own OPDS, Grimmory, or BookOrbit Sources and browse your libraries in Leaf. Downloading from your own Sources requires Leaf Pro. START READING FOR FREE Import and read your DRM-free EPUBs, save bookmarks, and use iCloud sync without a subscription. Leaf Pro adds bookmark note creation, custom shelves, downloads from your own Sources, KOReader progress sync, premium themes, custom font imports, and advanced reading controls. Leaf Pro is an optional annual subscription. Leaf currently supports DRM-free EPUB books. TERMS OF USE https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Athene is a reader for the books you already own. Bring your books from Files, from Mail, from your computer over Wi‑Fi, from a link, or from anywhere that can share a file, and they go on a shelf that looks like one. EPUB and PDF open as they are; MOBI, AZW3, Word, FB2, TXT and HTML files become books as they arrive. The Athene Bookstore has free classics from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks and, in the US, DRM-free books to buy. If you keep your library on a calibre server, Athene browses that shelf too, from + in your Library — on your home network, or from anywhere through your own VPN such as Tailscale. THE PAGE Open a book and the app steps back. Just the page, on white, sepia or night paper, or paper in any colour you like, in the typeface and size you read best, including any Google Font. Highlight a passage, add a note, drop a bookmark, and find them all again under Marks. Select a passage in another language to translate it. The shelf itself follows the time of day — Morning, Sunset, Night — or stays on the one you pick. NOTES YOU CAN DRAW Type a note in the margin, or sketch in it. On a PDF, mark up the page itself with Apple Pencil. THE NOTEBOOK Every highlight, note and drawing from every book you read, in one place, with filters and search. Write what stayed with you after a chapter, a reading session or a whole book, typed or drawn; your reflections stay even if the book leaves your shelf. LISTEN Any book, read aloud in a warm, natural voice that runs entirely on your device, and keeps reading with the screen locked. PDFs too: Listen skips the running heads, page numbers and footnotes, reads scanned pages, and describes the pictures and tables as it reaches them. The voice is a one-time download of about 242 MB. A DICTIONARY Select a word to see what it means and how to say it. It is built in, and it works offline. ASK THE PAGE Tap the owl while you read and ask about what is in front of you. Who is she again? What did that word mean? What just happened? The Owl answers from the pages around where you are — this chapter at most, never the whole book, never your other books — and if the pages do not say, it tells you that instead of guessing. YOUR MODEL, YOUR CHOICE On a device with Apple Intelligence, the Owl thinks on the device and nothing you ask is sent anywhere. Or point it at your own Ollama server on your own network. Or bring a key from Claude, OpenRouter or OpenAI. Athene asks before the first question leaves the device, names the address it would send to, and remembers your answer. ON EVERY DEVICE Turn on iCloud Sync and your place, highlights, notes, drawings, collections and reading settings follow you between your iPhone and iPad. It goes only to your own private iCloud, and what you wrote is encrypted on your device first. With a calibre server, highlights go both ways: yours to your calibre library, and the ones you make in calibre's own reader to Athene. With KOReader on an e-reader, your books, your place, and your highlights, notes and bookmarks stay in step through a sync server of your own. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION Athene has no account and no analytics, and nothing about you goes to the developer. Your books, your notes and your questions stay on your device or go only where you have pointed them. The privacy policy says the same, in plain words. FREE Reading is free. No account, no subscription, no limit: the shelf, the reader, Listen, the dictionary, the Owl, the Notebook, iCloud Sync, calibre and KOReader, your highlights and notes. Nothing is locked. WHAT READERS SAY “The app works perfectly with my Calibre library.” (ZenoNow) “I’d happily pay for Athene if it weren’t free.” (Momji_iphone) Athene requires iOS 26. The on-device Owl requires Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro and later, M-series iPad, iPad mini A17 Pro); on other devices the Owl works with your own Ollama server or an API key. Pictures in PDFs are described on iOS 27 with Apple Intelligence.