Support

Athene for iPhone and iPad

Write to athene@theadipost.com. It reaches the person who wrote the app. If something is broken, say which device, which iOS version, and what the book was; that is usually enough to find it.

For how each part of Athene works, a topic at a time, see the Athene Docs. The answers below are the short versions.

Getting books in

Athene reads EPUB and PDF, and turns MOBI, AZW3, Word, Pages, FB2, TXT and HTML files into books as they arrive. Tap + on the Library for the Athene Bookstore (the free classics of Project Gutenberg, and in the US DRM-free books to buy), a book sent from your computer over Wi‑Fi, a link to a book on the web, your Zotero library, or an OPDS catalogue. You can also open a file from Files, iCloud Drive, Mail or any other app and choose Athene from the share sheet. The book is copied into Athene, so it stays available whether or not the original does, and a book already on your shelf isn’t added again.

To add a calibre library kept in iCloud Drive, Dropbox or anywhere else in Files, tap + on the Library, then Files, and pick the library’s folder. Athene asks first, then adds each book in its best format with calibre’s titles, covers and tags, and skips the ones already on your shelf.

Athene sells no books. It reads the ones you already have.

Your shelf

Press and hold a book and tap About This Book to see what it’s about, its series and its tags. Books from calibre bring calibre’s tags with them, and Collections lists them on its Calibre Tags page, so you can browse your shelf by tag. The book you’re reading wears a bookmark on the shelf, and the Continue reading line under the Library’s title opens it at your page; Settings → Reading → Show What You’re Reading turns the line off.

To change the shelf’s order, tap Collections, then Sort, beside Search: Title, Author, Series, Recently Read, or Your Order, the one you arrange by hand. The button says Sort in Your Order and the order’s name in any other.

Under Browse, Collections opens a page each for the authors on your shelf, calibre’s tags, its series, each in reading order, and its formats. An EPUB that calibre made brings its series and tags with it, even from Files or iCloud Drive.

Export Book, in the same menu, gives you the book itself as a file to save to Files, send, or open in another reader: an EPUB, including the one Athene made of a Pages or Word document, or a PDF just as it came.

Turning pages

Swipe across the page, or tap near its edge, to turn it; Settings → Extras → Tap Zones changes where a tap turns. With a keyboard, the arrow keys, the space bar and Page Up and Page Down turn pages too, in PDFs as well, and keep working after you tap the page; on a trackpad a two-finger swipe across the page turns one page.

Connecting a calibre server

Athene talks to calibre’s own content server, to calibre-web and to anything else that serves an OPDS catalogue. Tap + in your Library, then Calibre, and enter the server’s address, for example http://192.168.1.20:8083, with the username and password you use for that server, and connect. The port can be left off: Athene tries calibre’s 8080 and calibre-web’s 8083 by itself.

To download several books at once, tap Select on the line above a list, or touch and hold a book, and pick books or whole authors, series or tags; they come two at a time, and a batch of more than 20 books or 250 MB asks first. A book’s page opens as a card: swipe sideways for the next book in the row, or pull down to put it away.

It can’t reach the server.

Athene says why: calibre isn’t running, the port is wrong, the computer is asleep, or Local Network is switched off. If calibre’s Content server is off, “Show me how” walks you through turning it on. The first time it starts, your computer asks whether calibre may accept incoming connections: choose Allow, or the server runs and Athene still can’t reach it. If that question was dismissed, allow calibre in the computer’s firewall settings. Otherwise, check that the device is on the same network, and that iOS has been allowed to find local devices: Settings → Athene → Local Network. Over Tailscale or another VPN, the server’s VPN address works as it does at home; a server reached over the open internet needs an https address.

It connects but the shelf is empty.

calibre-web only exposes books over OPDS to accounts that have permission to download. Check that account in calibre-web’s admin.

Downloads stall or fail partway.

calibre-web rate-limits OPDS requests. Athene waits and retries on its own; give it a moment before trying again.

Sending to calibre

Turn on Send Highlights & Progress in Settings → Sync → Calibre and your highlights and how far you’ve read go back to your calibre library, into columns you choose, and finished books can be marked as read in a Read column, which Athene finds whether calibre calls it Read, Finished, Have read or Done. Highlights go the other way too: the ones you make in calibre’s own reader come into Athene. How to Set Up Sending, on the same page, shows what to set up in calibre first, in the desktop app or in calibre-server running on its own, on a NAS for example.

KOReader

Athene keeps KOReader on your Kobo or other e-reader in step: your books, your place, and your highlights, notes and bookmarks, through an Athene sync server you run on a computer of your own. If your e-reader already syncs with another KOReader sync server, such as CrossPoint’s on an Xteink, Athene can sign in to it too and keep your place in each book in step; highlights, notes and sending books need your own Athene server. Turn it on in Settings → Sync → KOReader, whose guide walks you through the server, KOReader and an Xteink, a step at a time. It is off until you turn it on; with an Athene server, a book’s menu in the Library has Send to KOReader.

Zotero

Tap + on the Library, then Zotero, and sign in on zotero.org itself, so Athene never sees your password; or tap Use it instead and paste an API key. My Library and your groups open with their collections and search, and the arrow on a paper downloads its PDF or EPUB. From then on its highlights and underlines, with their notes, go both ways as Zotero’s own annotations, in matching colours, a few seconds after you make them; Zotero’s sticky notes and ink stay in Zotero.

A paper’s page has Cite, for its reference and its in-text citation in APA, Chicago, MLA or any style on zotero.org. Settings → Sync → Zotero shows how sync stands, takes your WebDAV server if Zotero keeps your files there, and signs you out; the papers you downloaded stay on your shelf.

The Notebook

Every highlight, note and drawing from every book is in the Notebook tab, with filters and search; tap one to open its page. Reflections are there too: write what stayed with you after a chapter, a reading session or a whole book, and it stays even when the book leaves your shelf. Touch and hold a note to export it as text or as a PDF that keeps your drawings; a book’s whole set exports from its page, and a PDF book can go out as itself, with your marks on its pages.

Listen

Tap the headphones while you read and the book is read aloud from where you are. The voice runs on your device and is a one-time download the first time you use it, about 242 MB, so start it on Wi‑Fi. It keeps reading with the screen locked, and the lock screen’s controls pause and resume it. The speed goes from 0.5x to 2.5x.

Listen reads books in English, French, Italian and Spanish, and tells the language from the book itself. Each language keeps its own voice: Siwis for French, Sara or Nicola for Italian, and Dora or Alex for Spanish. French and Italian can also have Apple’s Audrey, Federica and Emma, once you have downloaded them in iOS Settings.

PDFs are read aloud too. Listen skips running heads, page numbers and footnotes, reads scanned pages, and describes pictures and tables as it reaches them: from the PDF’s own descriptions, or on iOS 27 by Apple Intelligence, on your device.

iCloud Sync

Turn it on in Settings → Sync. Your place, highlights, notes, drawings, collections, papers and reading settings then follow you to every device signed in to your iCloud. It is off until you turn it on, and it goes only to your own private iCloud; the words you wrote are stored in iCloud’s encrypted fields. Highlights and ink in PDFs, and your reflections, stay on the device they were made on.

iPhone Duo

Open the Duo and a book lies across the fold as two facing pages, with the reader’s buttons in a strip at the side; a note opens on the page facing its passage, and the Notebook splits at the fold. Stand it up half open and the page sits on top, with the page turns, Listen and your note below. Closed, the outer screen works like any iPhone. PDFs show two pages side by side on the open Duo, and from iOS 27 on an iPad held sideways.

Extras

Settings → Extras holds what some readers love and most never need, each off until you turn it on. Tap Zones chooses where a tap turns the page: the sides, or the top and bottom for reading lying down. Mystery Book puts a die on the Library that picks your next book off your shelf. Blank Pages adds a page about no book to the Notebook’s reflections. More Drawing Tools adds the fountain pen, pencil and brush to the ink tray. Cover When Folded, on iPhone Duo, shows the book’s cover and how far you’ve read when you set the Duo down shut with a book open, and While Charging keeps it there like a photo frame. Turning an extra off never takes away what you made with it.

The Owl

The Owl answers questions about the passage you are reading. It can run three ways: on Apple Intelligence, where the device supports it and it is turned on in Settings; against an Ollama server you run yourself, by entering its address in the Owl’s setup screen; or with an API key you bring from Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter.

If the Owl says it isn’t available, the usual cause is that Apple Intelligence is off or still preparing on that device, and no server or key has been configured. One of the three has to be true.

Purchases

Athene sells nothing today. Everything it does is free: the reader, the library, the Notebook, Listen, the dictionary, the Owl, iCloud Sync, calibre, KOReader and Zotero, your highlights and notes.

Your data

Everything Athene knows lives on your device, and in your own iCloud if you turn on iCloud Sync. Deleting the app deletes what is on the device, including your library, so export or move anything you want to keep first; the Notebook exports your notes, and Export Book in a book’s menu saves the book itself. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is stored and what is sent.

Reporting a bug

Write to athene@theadipost.com with your device and iOS version, what you did and what happened instead, and, for a book that won’t open or renders wrongly, where the book came from and the file if you are able to share it. A book that fails is almost always a book with something unusual in it, and having the file is the difference between a fix and a guess.