A reader for your own books.
Athene 3.4 is on the App Store. Free. EPUB, PDF and more, on iPhone and iPad.
Also on Android: Athene for Android.
Athene in French, Italian and Spanish, Listen in Spanish, and a book that opens out of its cover.
3.4.61 NovThe Athene Bookstore: free classics and, in the US, DRM-free books to buy and keep. An OPDS address works without http://.
3.4.531 OctPick a stack of calibre books, or whole authors, series and tags, and download them together; a book’s page opens as a card.
Free, with no account and nothing collected.
EPUB, PDF, MOBI, Word, Pages and more, laid out as real pages.
Ask the Owl about the page you are on. It runs on your device.
Your calibre library, both ways, at home or over a VPN.
“I finally have all the train operation manual PDF’s from my calibre server right on my phone.”
“…an app that’s easier to use and less clunky than Kindle or Apple Book.”
“I’d happily pay for Athene if it weren’t free.”
Real pages, any paper and any type, and a dictionary under your finger.
Books are laid out as real pages, turned with a swipe, a trackpad, or the arrow keys and space bar. The paper can be white, sepia, night or any colour you mix, and the type any Google Font: Aa, then Add a Font. Change either mid-chapter and the words reflow without losing your place.
Select a word to see what it means and how to say it; the dictionary is built in, and it works offline. Select a passage in another language and Athene translates it, with Apple’s translation.
Every highlight, note and drawing, kept in one place.
Every highlight, note and drawing from every book, in one tab, with filters and search; tap one to open its page. Write what stayed with you after a chapter or a whole book, and it stays even when the book leaves your shelf. Hold a note to export it as text or a PDF, and a PDF book goes out with your marks on its pages.
Highlight a passage and type a note, or switch it to Draw and sketch in the margin with a tray of pens and inks. PDFs take highlights and notes as books do, and ink on the page itself from Apple Pencil or a finger.
calibre, Zotero, your e-reader and free classics, on every device you read on.
Tap + in your Library, then Calibre, and your server opens on what’s new and more by the author you’re reading, at home or over Tailscale or another VPN. Type the computer’s address without a port and Athene finds calibre by itself. Turn on Send to Calibre and highlights go both ways: yours and how far you’ve read to calibre, and the ones you make in calibre’s own reader to Athene.
Tap + on the Library, then Zotero, sign in on zotero.org, and any paper’s PDF or EPUB in My Library or your groups comes down to your shelf. Highlight it and the highlight is in Zotero a few seconds later, with your note, and the ones you made in Zotero come to Athene. On a paper’s page, Cite gives you its reference in APA, MLA, Chicago or any style on zotero.org.
With KOReader on your Kobo or other e-reader, your books, your place, and your highlights, notes and bookmarks stay in step with Athene, through an Athene sync server of your own. Any other KOReader sync server, like CrossPoint’s on an Xteink, keeps your place in step too. Settings › Sync › KOReader shows you how, a step at a time.
Tap + on the Library for the Athene Bookstore’s free classics, books sent from your computer over Wi‑Fi, a link to a book on the web, or an OPDS catalog. From Files, pick a whole folder, such as your calibre library in iCloud Drive or Dropbox, and every book comes in with calibre’s titles, covers and tags. MOBI, AZW3, Word, Pages, FB2, TXT and HTML files become books as they arrive.
Turn on iCloud Sync and your place, highlights, notes, drawings, collections and reading settings follow you between iPhone and iPad. It is off until you turn it on, and it goes only to your own private iCloud.
Any book read aloud, and a companion for the page you are on.
Tap the headphones and any book in English, French, Italian or Spanish is read aloud in a warm, natural voice that runs on your device, and keeps reading with the screen locked. PDFs too: Listen skips the running heads and page numbers, reads scanned pages, and describes the pictures as it reaches them. The natural voices are a one-time download.
A reading companion for the passage in front of you: who this character is, what that word meant in 1890. It runs on your device with Apple Intelligence, on your own Ollama server, or with an API key you bring.
The owl from Athene’s icon, in three short films made in Blender, and the music box tune was made for them too.
The owl falls asleep reading, the way people do.
A favourite line in Moby-Dick, a little ship drawn beside it, and off it sails.
The owl opens a pop-up book and flies into it.
Everything Athene does today is free, Listen, the Notebook, iCloud and KOReader sync included, with no subscription and nothing collected. No account. No analytics. No server but yours.
Read the privacy policy
The wooden shelf and the page curl, for the iPad or iPhone you kept. Free from Adi’s Repo.
Athene for iOS 6| Reads | EPUB and PDF, paginated and hyphenated, justified or ragged right; MOBI, AZW3, Word, Pages, FB2, TXT and HTML are turned into books on the way in. PDFs pinch to zoom, and from iOS 27 show two pages side by side where there’s room. |
|---|---|
| Library | Files, or a whole folder such as a calibre library in iCloud Drive or Dropbox; Wi‑Fi from your computer, a web link, the Athene Bookstore for Project Gutenberg’s free classics and, in the US, DRM-free books to buy, an OPDS catalog, your Zotero library, or a calibre or calibre-web server you run, at home or over a VPN such as Tailscale, where Select brings down a stack of books, or whole authors, series and tags, at once. |
| Shelf | Sorted in your own order or by title, author, series or recently read, from the Sort button beside Search. Your own collections, and Browse pages for the shelf’s authors, calibre’s tags, its series in reading order, and its formats. About This Book for what a book is about, its series and its tags. A bookmark on the book you’re reading, and a Continue reading line under the Library’s title. Export Book for the book itself as a file: an EPUB, the one Athene made of a Pages or Word document included, or a PDF as it came. |
| Reading | White, Sepia, Night or a paper you mix. Any Google Font, size, four line spacings, three margin widths, an optional progress line. One column in portrait, two in landscape. Pages turn with a swipe or a tap, two fingers across a trackpad, or the arrow keys, the space bar and Page Up and Down, in PDFs too. Translate a passage with Apple’s translation. |
| Listen | Any book or PDF in English, French, Italian or Spanish read aloud by a natural voice on the device, with the screen locked; Apple’s Audrey, Federica and Emma too, once downloaded. In PDFs, scanned pages are read and pictures described, from the PDF’s own descriptions or, on iOS 27, by Apple Intelligence on the device. From 0.5x to 2.5x. A one-time download. |
| iPad | Tabs across the top, the Notebook in two columns, a page number on each page of a sideways spread, and Contents, Aa and the Owl beside their buttons. |
| iPhone Duo | Open, two pages across the fold with the buttons in a strip beside them, a note on the facing page and the Notebook in two halves. Half open and standing, the page on top and the controls and notes below. Closed, the outer screen reads like any iPhone. |
| Notebook | Every highlight, note and drawing from every book, with filters and search, and reflections, typed or drawn. A note exports as text or PDF, a book’s set at once, a PDF book with its marks on its pages. |
| Marks | Highlights and typed or drawn notes in books and PDFs alike, and bookmarks; ink on PDF pages, the table of contents, search across the book and a built-in dictionary. |
| Sync | iCloud Sync between your devices, off until you turn it on. KOReader sync through an Athene server you run: books, place, highlights, notes and bookmarks; through any other KOReader sync server, your place. Send to Calibre for highlights, progress and finished books, and calibre’s own highlights back. |
| Zotero | My Library and your groups, with search. A paper’s PDF or EPUB on your shelf, its highlights, underlines and notes in step with Zotero’s annotations both ways. Cite in APA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, MLA, Nature, Vancouver or any style on zotero.org. Files from your own WebDAV server. |
| The Owl | Apple Intelligence on the device, an Ollama server you run, or an API key you bring. |
| Extras | In Settings › Extras, each off until you turn it on: Tap Zones, to choose where a tap turns the page; Mystery Book, a die on the Library that picks your next read from your shelf; Blank Pages in the Notebook; More Drawing Tools; and on iPhone Duo, Cover When Folded, the book’s cover on the screen when you set it down shut. |
| Languages | English, French, Italian and Spanish. Athene follows the language your iPhone or iPad is set to. |
| Price | Free. Everything Athene does today stays free. |
| Requires | iOS 26 or iPadOS 26. iPhone, iPhone Duo and iPad. |