LightReadr vs Lector

LightReadr turns your ebooks into audiobooks; with narration you actually want to listen to. Import the books you already have and either read normally or switch to natural-sounding narration mid-page. No robotic text-to-speech voice, no monthly subscription, no account required. NATURAL VOICE NARRATION Choose from several natural-sounding voices. Every word highlights as it's spoken, so you can follow along on the page. Tap any sentence to start narration right there; no need to scrub back to the beginning of the chapter. ENTIRELY ON YOUR DEVICE Narration is generated locally on your iPhone. Your books and the audio LightReadr creates from them never leave your device; there's no server involved in reading to you. BRING YOUR OWN BOOKS Import EPUB files from the Files app. LightReadr comes with five free public-domain classics already in your library, so you've got something to read the moment you install it. MAKE THE PAGE YOURS Adjust font, size, theme, margins, and line height; per book, so one title can look different from the next. Chapter navigation, when the book includes it, gets you around fast. RECAP SO FAR On supported Apple Intelligence devices, LightReadr can generate a short reminder of what's happened in your book so far, based on what you've actually read. YOUR PLACE, EVERYWHERE Reading progress, bookmarks, and highlights sync across your devices through your own iCloud account; never through a LightReadr server. Free. No account. No ads.

Lector is a speed reader that respects punctuation. Every RSVP reader flashes one word at a time at a fixed rate. That is what makes them fast, and also what makes them exhausting: a full stop goes by in exactly as long as the word "the". Lector weights the time each word holds — 1.8× at the end of a sentence, 1.4× at a clause, a little longer for long words — on a scheduler that corrects its own drift and never silently skips a word. Sentences keep their shape at speeds where they normally dissolve. TWO WAYS TO READ Flash mode holds each word still in the centre of the screen. Nothing moves, so your eye never has to chase anything, and this is the mode that works at the top of the speed range. Ticker mode scrolls the line continuously past a fixed mark, so you can see the words either side of the one you are on. Turn the phone sideways, and you get most of the sentence. Some books read better one way, some the other, so Lector remembers which mode you used for each book. CONTROLS YOU DON'T HAVE TO AIM FOR Press and hold anywhere to pause, let go to resume. Hold either edge to skim at up to 3× and release to drop back. Pull down while holding to latch that faster speed so you can let go. Nothing here needs you to find a small button while words are moving. YOUR OWN BOOKS Import EPUB, PDF and plain text files, or paste text straight in. Lector reads the book's own table of contents, so you can skip the front matter and jump between chapters. PDFs get their running heads stripped, and their line-end hyphens rejoined, because "extraor- dinary" is not two words. "Open in Lector" appears in the share sheet in Files, Mail, Safari and anywhere else, including for DRM-free library downloads. You can also point the camera at a printed page. Text recognition happens on the device, several pages at a time, and Lector keeps the words rather than the photograph. A GOAL MEASURED IN MINUTES The daily goal is minutes read, not words. A word target rewards winding the speed up and skimming, which is the one habit a speed-reading app should not encourage. Read five minutes and the day counts towards your streak; hit your goal, and you bank a streak freeze, which is spent automatically on a day you miss. EVERYTHING STAYS ON YOUR PHONE Lector has no servers, no analytics, no accounts you must create and no third-party code of any kind. Your library never leaves the device — not as a feature you switch on, but because there is nothing in the app that could send it anywhere. Export a backup to a single file whenever you want one, and restore it later; that file goes wherever you choose to put it. ALSO • A home screen widget with today's minutes and your streak • Live Activity on the Lock Screen while you read • Spotlight search that finds your books and their chapters by name • Hold the middle of a word to look it up without losing your place • A history chart by week, month or year, against your goal • Bionic emphasis, if bolded word-openings help you • Dynamic Type throughout, plus five reading sizes on top of it • Optional daily reminder that stays quiet on days you have already read Lector is for iPhone and needs iOS 17 or later.