Athene Reader

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. The Athene Bookstore has free classics from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks and, in the US, DRM-free books to buy. 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 and no analytics, and nothing about you goes to the developer. 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.

WHAT READERS SAY
“The app works perfectly with my Calibre library.” (ZenoNow)
“I’d happily pay for Athene if it weren’t free.” (Momji_iphone)

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.