Athene Reader vs Apricity

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. Free classics from Project Gutenberg are a tap away. 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, no analytics and no servers of its own. 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. 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.

Apricity (n.): the warmth of the sun on a winter's day. The best reading happens late, when the house is quiet and a single lamp makes a small warm room inside the dark. Apricity is built around that feeling: a reading room for your books, a voice to read them to you, and a desk for your notes. SOMEONE TO READ TO YOU Read Aloud lights up each sentence as it's read, plays on with the screen locked and in CarPlay, and has a sleep timer. Choose Apple's voices or 54 natural voices in eight languages, made on your device. Character Voice gives a story's characters a voice of their own, and Expressive Reading lets a whispered line sound whispered. Siri knows it: "Read my book in Apricity." YOUR BOOKS, ON REAL SHELVES Add a PDF, EPUB, Word document, MOBI, FB2, Markdown or text file and it stands on a wooden shelf, lit by a lamp at night and daylight by morning. Pick one of four bookcases, stand books by cover or spine, and keep some in a cabinet. Furnish it with 21 themes, 21 wallpapers or your photo, 13 woods, seven lamps and shelf decorations. THE WEB AND THE CLASSICS Paste a link or share a page from Safari, and its story becomes a book, ready to read or hear at once. Or turn the bookcase to thousands of free public-domain classics, shelved by kind like a bookshop's; pick one and it's yours in seconds. TWO WAYS TO READ Original shows the page exactly as published, recoloured for the light you read by. Reflow sets the words like a book, in the face, size and spacing you choose. Scans are read too, and comics and manga open as pages, manga right to left. Highlight, keep notes, look up words and see how much you've read this week. KEEP THE LINES YOU LOVE Save a quote or a word as you read; the Quote of the Day and Word of the Day widgets bring them back each morning. WRITE ON YOUR PDFS Markup puts the notebook's pens on a PDF's own pages: circle a figure, answer a worksheet, and the PDF stays as it was. Split View keeps a notebook open beside the book. NOTEBOOKS THAT FEEL LIKE PAPER Write with Apple Pencil or a finger; pinch in close and the page stays sharp. Neat Writing tidies your hand, and shapes snap clean. Pages come in 81 kinds of paper, from Cornell notes to music staff. Add stickers, photos and sticky notes, choose from 30 covers, and search your handwriting. Notability and GoodNotes notes come in as ink you can keep editing. RECORD THE LECTURE Record as you write, then tap your writing to hear that moment again. Transcripts are made on your device, and with Apple Intelligence, Smart Notes sums up a notebook or quizzes you on it. SOMETHING TO READ BY A fire in the grate, birdsong, rain on the roof, jazz in a busy café: four soundscapes made on the device, and a focus timer to study by. YOUR BOOKS STAY WITH YOU There is no account; your books stay on your device, and iCloud sync carries your highlights, notes, Markup, notebooks and recordings to your other devices. FREE AND PREMIUM Free, for good: every kind of book, pages from the web, the free classics, shelves, both ways of reading, highlights, notes, Markup, every book's notebook, your own notebooks with the seven Classic covers, recording, and iCloud sync. Apricity Premium adds Read Aloud with every voice, transcripts, Smart Notes, exporting notes and notebooks, the Crafted and Illustrated covers, stickers, stamps and washi tape, the soundscapes and focus timer, furnishing the room, and your own fonts. Every new reader gets 14 days of Premium free, with no card asked for. After that, Apricity Premium is an auto-renewing yearly subscription. Payment is charged to your Apple Account when you confirm the purchase. It renews automatically unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period, and you can manage or cancel it in your Apple Account settings. When Premium ends, nothing you made is deleted. Made by Tesorin. Terms of Use: https://www.trytesorin.com/apricity/terms Privacy Policy: https://www.trytesorin.com/apricity/privacy