Press Kit
Pagina turns your Home Screen into the current page of your book. Everything on this page is free to use in articles, reviews and videos about the app.
In three sentences
Pagina is an iOS reading app whose heart is an interactive Home Screen widget: it shows a real, precisely measured page of the book you are reading, with buttons to turn the page without opening an app. Tap the text and you continue in a full-screen reader, with seventy-four public-domain classics included and your own DRM-free EPUBs welcome. It is a solo project by an independent developer in the Netherlands, sold as a one-time purchase, with no accounts, no ads and no data collection of any kind.
The story behind it
I kept picking up my phone for no reason and putting it down again ten minutes later, having read nothing. So I put the page I was actually reading where the feeds used to be. Once the book is already open every time you look at your phone, reading becomes the default and scrolling becomes a choice, and that turned out to work well enough that it became an app.
Facts
- Name: Pagina. (the period is part of the name)
- Tagline: Read books, not feeds.
- Developer: Etienne Schraven, independent, Netherlands
- Platform: iPhone and iPad, iOS 18 or later
- Category: Books
- Languages: English and Dutch
- Price: one-time purchase, no subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads
- Status: in submission to App Review, August 2026. The App Store link appears here and on the home page at launch.
- Website: eschr988.github.io
- Contact: ios.pagina.app@gmail.com
What it does
- Interactive Home Screen widget with page-turn buttons; tap the text to open the reader
- Lock Screen widgets and StandBy, for your page on the nightstand
- A full-screen reader that hides every control, and the status bar, on a tap
- Four classics preloaded and seventy more in a built-in catalog, all bundled with the app, so adding one works offline
- Import your own DRM-free EPUBs; italics and bold survive the import, on the widget too
- Chapters, full-text search, a scrubber with live preview and a jump-back button
- Six classic fonts, adjustable size, line spacing and margins, light and dark, with a true-black page for OLED screens at night
- Reading stats and streaks that only count pages you actually read, including the ones you turn on the widget
- Reading position, stats and streak sync between your own devices through your personal iCloud
How it works, for the technically curious
There is no web view anywhere. Pagina measures with TextKit exactly how much text fits the widget or the reading area it is given, so a page is a measurement rather than a fixed unit, and your reading position is a single character offset in the book. That is what makes the widget possible, and it is why changing font, size or margins never costs you your place.
The catalog is not a download service: all seventy-four books ship inside the app, compressed, so adding one works on a plane. Sync uses Apple's iCloud key-value store in the reader's own account. There is no server, no account and no analytics, and the App Store privacy label is "Data Not Collected".
Screenshots
Click any image for the full-resolution file.
Video and icon
Download the video (21 seconds, 886 by 1920, no sound) · app icon (512 by 512 PNG)
Usage
These assets may be used freely in coverage of Pagina. Please write the name as "Pagina." with the period, and do not alter the screenshots other than cropping or scaling. Review copies and promo codes are available on request; email ios.pagina.app@gmail.com and you will get a reply from the developer.
The books shown in the screenshots are public-domain works digitized by Project Gutenberg. Pagina is an independent app, not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Project Gutenberg or Apple.