Comparison

BookWrite vs Emend

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

Head to head
About

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.

Highlights
  • 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
Features
Read full description

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.

About

Emend

Features
Read full description

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

BookWrite2 screens
Emend4 screens

Verdict

The call

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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

BookWrite ships an update every 5 days, Emend weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 31, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard1 real difference · 8 level
BookWrite versus Emend: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterBookWriteEmend
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (1 ratings) — better—
Number of ratings1 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 5 days — betterWeekly
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFree—
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPod
Requires iOS18.115.1 — better
Further details — not scored
Size33 MB36 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperRichard WheatleySunlit Game Studio LLC

In-app purchases

None

BookWrite

No in-app purchases

None

Emend

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is BookWrite free?
BookWrite is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Emend free?
Emend is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do BookWrite or Emend have ads?
Neither BookWrite nor Emend shows ads.
Which is updated more often, BookWrite or Emend?
BookWrite ships an update every 5 days, and Emend weekly. Most recently, BookWrite was updated on October 31, 2026 and Emend on October 24, 2026.

Other comparisons