Volume vs Athene Reader

Volume turns the books you own and the articles you find on the web into one private, offline library — and reads them aloud with a natural neural voice, generated entirely on your device. SAVE ARTICLES FROM YOUR BROWSER Found something worth reading? Tap Share in Safari or another app and save it to your library as an article — a clean, offline copy of the text, ready to read or listen to like any book. File it straight into a collection if you like. IMPORT YOUR BOOKS Bring your own EPUB, Markdown, plain-text, and RTF files. Books and articles land in one searchable library, whatever their source. READ COMFORTABLY A reflowable reader with themes, adjustable typography, instant resume, chapter navigation, and footnotes in place — fully offline. KEEP WHAT MATTERS Highlight passages and add notes that survive font changes. See them gathered for one book or across your whole library, and tag them by topic to find them again. LISTEN WITH READ-ALONG Tap play and your book or article is read aloud by an on-device neural voice, with the current passage highlighted as it is spoken. Figures, tables, code, and equations are announced instead of silently skipped, and short pauses mark headings, quotations, and section breaks. Narration follows chapter jumps, keeps your place, works like an audiobook from the lock screen — and by default is kept, so going back or listening again is instant. IN THE CAR With CarPlay, pick a recent book on your car's screen and narration picks up where you left off, with chapters a tap away. TAKE IT WITH YOU Export a narrated book as an M4B audiobook with chapter markers that plays in any audiobook app, or export the original file you imported. Books you finish are marked automatically, and Clean Up clears out what you're done with in one step. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION No account. No ads. No tracking. No telemetry. Your books, your articles, and your reading never leave your device — narration is generated locally, and once something is saved, everything works in airplane mode. The User Guide is pre-loaded, so you can hear read-along the moment the app opens — and it doubles as a seven-chapter tour of importing, reading, and listening. Narration voices are synthesized speech (Kyutai pocket-tts, CC-BY voices); quality of pronunciation can vary on unusual words and names.

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.