Comparison

Flumen vs Readr

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Flumen

Features
Read full description

Read your EPUB books on iPhone, iPad, and Mac with Flumen. Import your own files, browse classics, and keep your books together in one library. Organize your books Create collections, sort by title, author, or progress, and filter books by what you've started or finished. Bookmark the book you're reading to keep it at the top of Library and ready to open from Home. Return to your reading Home shows your current book, saved chapter, and reading progress, with a Continue Reading button to take you back. See how many minutes you've read today and return to other books you've started. Set up the page to suit you Choose a reading theme, font, and text size. Use Paper or Sepia for a warmer page, or switch to a dark theme. Flumen remembers your reading preferences for each book. Find something to read Browse genres and authors, search Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, and download public-domain books straight to your library. Open a book's details to learn more before adding it. Flumen Pro The free version holds up to 15 books and includes EPUB import, Discovery, collections, reader customization, and today's reading time. Flumen Pro is a one-time purchase that adds: • Unlimited books in your library. • Reading goals, streaks, weekly charts, and monthly summaries, including a comparison with the same point last month. • iCloud sync for your books, reading progress, collections, bookmarked book, and reader settings across your Apple devices. To sync, sign in to the same Apple Account with iCloud enabled on each device. Privacy Your library and reading history are stored on your device, with optional iCloud sync through Flumen Pro. Flumen has no ads or third-party analytics tracking.

About

Readr

This app allows you to read, listen to, and ask questions about your digital books. It provides AI-powered answers based on your reading progress and can generate drafts from your highlights. Enjoy a private reading experience with on-device text-to-speech.

Highlights
  • AI-powered Q&A about book content
  • On-device text-to-speech narration
  • Draft generation from highlights
  • Recap feature for reading progress
  • Supports EPUB, PDF, TXT, and Markdown
  • Privacy-focused with no tracking or account
Features
Read full description

Read, listen, and ask questions as you go. Readr answers from what you've read so far and never spoils what's ahead — and clearly labels anything it adds from elsewhere. ASK THE BOOK Open an EPUB, PDF, plain-text or Markdown file you already own, select a sentence, and ask about it. Readr answers from the pages you've read, not the pages you haven't, so nothing ahead of your place can slip out. Choose "Whole book" to ask about all of it. And it isn't limited to the book: ask how the science has moved on, who directed the adaptation, or how an idea aged, and you get a useful answer that shows which part came from the book and which from outside it. Readr won't attribute an outside claim to the book you're reading. Back after a week away? Tap Recap on your Continue Reading card and Readr tells you the story so far, from only the pages you've read — it can't spoil what comes next. Ask needs an AI account of your own: connect an Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter key, or sign in with OpenRouter. You pay that company directly for what you use, and you can change or disconnect at any time. On an Apple silicon Mac you can use a local Ollama model instead and stay offline. Without one, Readr is still a complete reader — Ask simply stays off. LISTEN Press Listen and Readr reads the book aloud, starting from the page you're on — not the top of the chapter. The page turns itself to follow the voice, and the place it saves is where the voice left off, so switching between reading and listening never costs you your spot. The narrator is Readr Voice, a neural voice that runs entirely on your device: no account, no subscription, and nothing about your book ever leaves the device to be read aloud. Its voice model downloads once, the first time you listen, and the Listen bar shows the wait. Readr Voice keeps reading with the screen locked: it reads ahead while the app is open and plays from that with the phone in your pocket. Prefer Apple's built-in voices? They're a tap away under "Other voices" in the voice menu, with nothing to download at all. Skip by sentence or by chapter, change the speed or the voice mid-sentence and it carries on from that word, and set a sleep timer that counts listening rather than clock time — pause for lunch and the countdown waits for you. It keeps playing with the screen locked, with lock-screen and headphone controls, and reads PDFs as well as EPUBs. HIGHLIGHTS BECOME A DRAFT Highlight as you read, then turn those highlights into a first draft. Readr orders them by reading position, keeps your quotes intact, and turns them into an editable draft you can export as Markdown. PRIVACY No usage tracking. No account. No subscription. Your books, highlights, notes and questions live on your device, and reading them aloud happens there too. When you use Ask, your question and the book text needed to answer it go straight to the company you connected — never through a Readr server, because there isn't one. Your keys are stored in the device Keychain. READING THAT FEELS LIKE READING • EPUB, PDF, plain-text and Markdown — DRM-free files you own • A book to start on: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is in your library on first launch, so you can try everything before importing your own • Three layouts: continuous scroll, single page, or two facing pages • Paper, Sepia and Dark themes, with your choice of typeface and spacing • Table of contents, bookmarks, in-book search, footnote popups • Five highlight colors, notes, and a Notes panel that exports to Markdown • Continue Reading picks up exactly where you left off, reading or listening • On iPad: sidebar and reader side by side, two-page spreads, and hardware keyboard page turns FREE AND OPEN SOURCE Readr is free and MIT-licensed, developed in the open. Read the code, file an issue, or send a bug report from inside the app — there's a Report a bug button in Settings that attaches your app version and recent errors, and nothing about what you've been reading.

Screenshots

Flumen4 screens
Readr4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Readr at none against Flumen's 1. On price, update cadence, 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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Flumen sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Readr asks for nothing beyond the download.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Flumen ships an update every 9 days, Readr every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on October 22, 2026 and October 7, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard1 real difference · 9 level
Flumen versus Readr: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterFlumenReadr
PriceFreeFree
Rating—3.0 (1 ratings) — better
Positive reviews—0.0% of reviews
Number of ratings—1 — better
Update frequencyEvery 9 daysEvery 5 days — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesNo — better
Monetization—Free
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad
Requires iOS17.017.0
Further details — not scored
Size16 MB43 MB
Age rating12+17+
DeveloperMathias Jaeger-PedersenAnusree Jayakrishnan

In-app purchases

1 purchases

Flumen

One-time1
  • Flumen Pro$6.99
None

Readr

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Flumen free?
Flumen is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Readr free?
Readr is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Flumen or Readr have ads?
Neither Flumen nor Readr shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Flumen or Readr?
Flumen ships an update every 9 days, and Readr every 5 days. Most recently, Flumen was updated on October 22, 2026 and Readr on October 7, 2026.

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