Who makes Lectern
Built by readers, for reading
Lectern is made by Hofstack, an independent studio in the Netherlands. It exists because we wanted one calm app that reads and listens to every kind of book, keeps the author’s typography intact, and never watches what we read.
Why Lectern exists
Most ebook apps are either beautiful but shallow, or powerful but exhausting — and too many are paid for with ads and tracking. We wanted the third option: a reader deep enough for a serious reading life, calm enough to disappear, and private by default. So we built it.
What we believe
- Reading fidelity first. A book should look the way its author set it — verse keeps its line breaks, scene breaks get an ornament, chapters can open with a drop cap.
- Private by default. No account, no analytics, no tracking. Your library and reading data stay on your device; sync goes only through a folder you own.
- Offline is not a feature, it is the baseline. The whole app works with no connection.
- Calm over clever. Sensible defaults up front, depth behind one tap — never a wall of switches.
Independent and paid, on purpose
Lectern is a paid app with no ads because that is the honest way to keep it private. There is no investor pushing growth metrics and no ad network to answer to — just readers who paid once, and our responsibility to them. It is developed and maintained by Hofstack and updated regularly.
Say hello
Found a bug, want a feature, or just want to talk about books? Write to info@lecternreader.app — we read everything that comes in.