BookWrite vs The Book I Wrote
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
BookWrite
This app transforms your writing experience by allowing you to craft books with customizable aesthetics, from cover design to page style. It offers tools for organizing stories, drawing, illustrating, and exporting your work in various formats. It also includes features to help you maintain writing habits and ensure your work remains private.
- Customizable book aesthetics (cover, pages, pen)
- Locked diary with Face ID/passcode
- Drawing and illustration tools
- Story organization (plot board, story bible)
- Export to PDF, EPUB, TXT, audiobook
- Writing goal tracking and prompts
- Privacy-focused with no ads or tracking
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Step through the door of an old bookshop and write. Open ScribeMe and you're standing at the door of a bookshop. Push it open, step inside, and your library is waiting on the shelf - every book you've written, standing spine-out, in whatever order you like. MAKE A BOOK, NOT A DOCUMENT Choose how a book feels before you write a word: hardcover, leather, cloth or paperback; the colour of the boards; cream, white or parchment pages; and the pen in your hand - fountain pen, ballpoint, pencil or marker, each with its own ink and weight of line. Pick a typeface with real character. Every cover gets its own grain, so no two books on your shelf look alike. Tall, square and wide picture-book shapes are all here. A DIARY THAT LOCKS Any book can be locked with Face ID or your passcode - a private diary that stays private. Night pages give you dark paper and light ink for writing after bedtime. WRITE, DRAW, ILLUSTRATE Real styling: bold, italics, centred lines, scene breaks. Draw straight onto the page with Apple Pencil or a fingertip, and add photo illustrations wherever you like. Draw your own cover, too. ORGANIZE A REAL STORY Chapters with a contents sheet. A plot board that lays your pages out at a glance. A story bible that interviews your characters and remembers your places. Story templates - three acts, hero's journey, fairy tale, mystery - that scaffold the chapters for you. Find and replace, and search across the whole shelf. TAKE IT OFF THE DEVICE Export a typeset PDF with cover, dedication, contents and illustration plates. Print a fold-at-home booklet. Make an EPUB ebook, a plain-text file, or an audiobook read aloud. Back up your whole library to a single file and carry it to another device. KEEP GOING Daily goals, streaks, milestones and writing sprints. A home-screen widget with your shelf and your streak. An evening writing prompt if you want one. Read a finished book with a real page curl, or have it read to you. YOURS, AND PRIVATE No account, no sign-up, no ads, no tracking, no subscriptions, and nothing is ever collected. Your books live on your device. Turn on iCloud sync (beta) and they sync through your own private iCloud - still nobody else's. Automatic version snapshots mean nothing you write is ever really lost. Everything in ScribeMe is included, free. It always will be. Made for iPhone and iPad.
The Book I Wrote
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Your story deserves more than a blank page. The app interface is available in 12 languages. Set a writing language for each book; your manuscript is never translated or rewritten automatically. Writing intelligence remains optimized for English. The Book I Wrote guides fiction writers from the first idea to an exportable manuscript, with a local working copy and optional private iCloud sync. Plan the story, capture ideas, draft scene by scene, refine prose, protect continuity, and finish in one focused studio. BUILD A STORY YOU CAN FINISH Story Architect asks focused questions about character, desire, conflict, stakes, world, ending, and reader promise. Review its proposed outline, scene goals, and open decisions before adding anything to your book. WRITE ONE SCENE AT A TIME Organize chapters and scenes, keep planning notes beside your prose, search the manuscript, and return to automatic version snapshots. Long manuscripts are processed scene by scene, so one edit does not reprocess the whole book. REFINE WITHOUT LOSING YOUR VOICE Bookify offers Clean, Natural, and Expand modes with Apple Foundation Models on supported devices. Elsewhere, its conservative local fallback provides limited deterministic cleanup rather than claiming a complete literary rewrite. Compare the preserved original with every proposal, review possible new facts, and accept only what belongs in your manuscript. Voice Lock measures evidence from your sample and accepted edits, and lets you edit the final style guidance. KEEP THE WHOLE STORY CONNECTED Story Brain tracks characters, places, objects, events, relationships, timeline entries, plot threads, and author-approved canon. Local search retrieves the relevant scenes instead of loading an entire novel at once. FIND WEAK SPOTS BEFORE READERS DO Book Doctor and Beta Reader flag supported risks in consistency, duplication, pacing, transitions, clarity, predictability, and emotional impact. Findings are advisory and link back to evidence in your scenes. CAPTURE IDEAS WHEN THEY HAPPEN Save text, dictate directly into a scene, record a thought, or import audio. On-device transcription is available when Apple Speech supports the selected language. You always decide where an idea belongs. FINISH AND EXPORT Create plain text, DOCX, PDF, or reflowable EPUB 3 from an immutable manuscript snapshot. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No developer account. No ads. No analytics SDK. No developer manuscript server. No paid AI API. Version 1.1 keeps a local working copy and core writing tools work offline. Optional private iCloud sync is off until you enable it. Eligible writing records then use your private CloudKit database; private record contents are not visible in Apple’s developer portal. Audio recordings and rebuildable derived indexes remain device-local. FREE TO BEGIN. PRO FOR LIFE. The free edition supports one local book with up to two chapters. A seven-day trial unlocks the complete studio, including optional private iCloud sync when available. Lifetime Pro is one non-consumable purchase—never a subscription. Plain-text export remains free so your writing is never trapped. Apple Foundation Models features require a compatible Apple Intelligence device and system version. Speech availability varies by installed language and device support. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
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Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: BookWrite at none against The Book I Wrote'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
Both are free to download. The Book I Wrote sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. BookWrite asks for nothing beyond the download.
BookWrite ships an update every 5 days, The Book I Wrote every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 31, 2026 and October 25, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | BookWrite | The Book I Wrote |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 5 days | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.1 | 18.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 33 MB | 12 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Richard Wheatley | Miroslav Pulik |
In-app purchases
BookWrite
No in-app purchases
The Book I Wrote
- Lifetime Pro$39.99









