✦ Now with Apple Intelligence
Every book you own.
One reader.
Text, EPUB, PDF, images and comic archives — opened straight from the folders you already keep them in. Nothing to import, nothing to convert.
Free TestFlight beta · iPhone, iPad & Mac · No account · Your files stay yours
It reads what you already have
Plain text, EPUB, PDF, images, and CBZ/CBR comic archives. Open them from a local folder, from iCloud Drive, or from Google Drive — SpectaBooks reads them where they are and never asks you to import a library.
Pages that behave like paper
Two turns, because pushing a page and pulling one are different gestures. Push and the paper wraps away under your fingertip; pull and a corner folds back, rolls over the bend and shows its reverse. Both are drawn as real geometry, not a fading image.
A comic, one panel at a time
A phone cannot show a whole comic page and keep it legible. SpectaBooks finds the panels and gives each one the screen, in the order the page is read — right to left for manga. On an iPad the panel lifts off the page as a card instead, and the spread stays behind it.
Read it in your language
Translate a whole book sentence by sentence — the original beside it, under it, or out of the way. In a comic the speech balloons are read off the page and covered with the translation; press one to see what it said. You choose who does the work: Apple's translator, Apple Intelligence, a model on the device, or a server of your own.
Look a word up, keep the ones worth keeping
Press a word and its dictionary form, its senses and the sentence you met it in come up — answered by the engine you chose, or by the dictionaries already on your device when it cannot. Keep one and it joins a list that travels between your devices, comes back for review, and leaves for Anki when you want it elsewhere.
The AI runs where you are
You choose who does the work: Apple's own translator, Apple Intelligence on the newer systems, a Gemma model downloaded onto the device, or a server of your own. The first three send nothing anywhere — the reading, the translating and the defining all happen on the machine in your hands. Cloud engines are offered too, and the screen that offers them says plainly what would leave.
It reads to you, out loud
Text and EPUB books, sentence by sentence, with the sentence lit on the page and the page turning to keep up with the voice. The voice is a neural one: it downloads once and then runs on the device, so nothing is sent away to be spoken. The lock screen, Control Centre and your headphone buttons all work, and it keeps reading with the phone in your pocket.
Your place, on whichever device is in your hand
Stop on page 240 on the Mac and the iPhone opens there. Where you stopped, the bookmarks you set and the words you kept all travel through your own iCloud — there is no account to make and no library on our servers, because there are no servers.
Take them on the plane
Keep a book on the device and it reads with no network at all — same bookmarks, same chapters, same place. And when the sun goes down the page warms to amber on its own, worked out from your time zone, never from your location.
Also in there
Get the beta
SpectaBooks is in open beta on TestFlight. Free while in beta.
Requires the TestFlight app. iOS 18+ · macOS 15+.