BookWrite vs Emend
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.
Emend
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Emend is a quiet place to write fiction on your iPhone. Your library is a shelf of books. Each book has chapters, and each chapter is one continuous page of prose — no cards, no blocks, no formatting toolbar in the way. Open a chapter and you are back exactly where you stopped, caret and all. Ideas that don't belong to a book yet go in Ideas: a searchable list you can tag, attach to a book later, or start a new book from. Every save keeps a revision. Wander down the wrong path for an afternoon and you can read the earlier draft, restore it, or keep both as alternatives. Anything you remove goes to Trash first. For working with an AI in another app, Emend prepares a focused passage for the clipboard and brings the response back as a draft you review before it touches your manuscript. Nothing leaves Emend on its own. Everything stays on your device. There is no account, no sync service and no analytics. When you want a copy elsewhere, export a book as Markdown or back up the whole library as a single file you keep wherever you like — and restore it on a new phone in one step. • Books, sections, chapters and one continuous page per chapter • Ideas with tags, search and one-tap attach to a book • Saved revisions, alternative drafts and a per-book dictionary of names • Trash with restore • Markdown export and full-library backup and restore • Works entirely offline Made for people writing a novel a few hundred words at a time.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is iOS requirement: Emend at 15.1 against BookWrite's 18.1. On price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases 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. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
BookWrite ships an update every 5 days, Emend weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 31, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | BookWrite | Emend |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 5 days — better | Weekly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 18.1 | 15.1 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 33 MB | 36 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Richard Wheatley | Sunlit Game Studio LLC |
In-app purchases
BookWrite
No in-app purchases
Emend
No in-app purchases









