Velo
Guides Compare Support
Download

Velo. The best way to read on iOS and Mac.

A premium reader for EPUBs and PDFs: real typography, instant mode switching, and a Focus Mode that shows one word at a time.

Download on the App Store Try Pro free for 7 days
Book II — Meditations 0:40
185 WPM

This is the real Velo engine. Tap ▶ to read. Tap Reader for the page.

How it works

Three modes. One position. Zero friction.

one
01 · Focus

Focus Mode

One word at a time, at your pace. No eye movement. The focus letter locks each word's recognition point. Timing adapts to punctuation and complexity.

50 — 1,000 WPM
catchwhatyoumissedfast
↔ · Scrub

Scrub Mode

Drag to scrub through words with momentum. A sliding context window keeps you oriented without breaking focus. The quickest way to rewind and catch what you missed.

Gesture-controlled
02 · Reader

Reader Mode

Full page text with your position highlighted. Scan ahead, re-read, let your eyes roam. One tap back to Focus Mode.

Your natural pace

Intelligent Import

Every PDF reads as smoothly as a book.

Velo reads the PDF's structure and rebuilds it as a book, on your device. Chapters found. Footnotes linked. Headers stripped. Two-column papers read in order. Scans read by OCR. The hardest files go to Enhanced Processing, Velo's AI pipeline.1

Chapter Detection

Parts, chapters and sections found in the PDF's structure. A real table of contents.

Footnotes & Endnotes

Footnotes linked in place. Endnotes matched to their references. Bibliography and appendices set apart.

Clean Text

Running headers and page numbers gone. Two-column layouts resequenced.

Scanned Pages

Vision OCR reads photographed pages on your device, then the same pipeline structures them.

Features

Built for serious readers.

For students & researchers

Read your whole reading list, and actually retain it.

Forty tabs and a folder of 200 PDFs you're supposed to have read. Kindle mangles two-column papers, other readers won't even open half of them, and you retain nothing skimming a scanned chapter at 1am. Velo is built for exactly this.

Intelligent Import

Hard PDFs, made readable

Two-column papers resequenced, running headers and page numbers stripped, scanned chapters OCR'd into clean prose. The papers Kindle mangles and Apple Books won't open, finally legible.

Nothing lost

Footnotes & citations intact

Footnotes are pulled from the page and linked inline, endnotes matched to their references, bibliography and appendices detected and separated. Hit a figure or an equation and one tap drops you into Reader at the exact word, layout intact.

Slow Focus Mode

Focus, even at 1am

Turn Focus Mode down and it becomes a focus lock: one word at a time, nowhere for tired attention to wander. Get through the dense passage once, and actually remember what it said.

Velo reads the PDFs and EPUBs you already own: your textbooks, lecture notes, and every paper you've exported. Need more? arXiv and PubMed exports, Project Gutenberg, and Standard Ebooks are free and DRM-free. Import any of them in a tap.

Bring your own reading list · all DRM-free

For developers & tech readers

Absorb the docs and technical books you keep meaning to finish.

You buy DRM-free by default, No Starch, Pragmatic, O'Reilly, Leanpub, Manning, and you judge a reader on whether code and diagrams survive. Velo is the best place to actually read that shelf, with a focus mode nothing else ships well.

Faithful rendering

Code blocks & diagrams, preserved

Technical EPUBs keep their structure: code blocks stay monospaced, diagrams and tables stay where the author put them. PDFs hold their layout where the source allows, not flattened into a reflowed text dump.

Intelligent Import

Long docs & specs, structured

Drop in an RFC, a whitepaper, or a 300-page manual. Chapter detection, clean headings, and footnote linking turn it into something you navigate like a book, not a wall of text you scroll and lose.

Three modes

Prose fast, code slow

Move through the narrative in Focus Mode to keep momentum, then one tap into Reader the moment you hit the listing you need to actually study, at the exact word, spatial layout intact.

Your O'Reilly, No Starch, Pragmatic, and Leanpub shelf is DRM-free by default. Velo reads all of it. Add recurring DRM-free tech bundles from Humble Bundle, or author-direct PDFs from Gumroad. Bring your own file; your library stays yours.

DRM-free by default · bring your own shelf

Pricing

Simple. Free to try.

Pro is free for a week. Then less than $6 a month.

Free $0forever
  • Every reading mode
  • Unlimited classics
  • 3 of your own books
  • Listen, Catch Me Up, Reading Goal
  • Highlights and notes
Get Velo
7-day free trial Velo Pro Save 35% vs monthly3 $5.83a month, billed $69.99 a year
  • Everything in Free
  • Unlimited books
  • 20 Enhanced Processing conversions a month
  • Cloud sync on iPhone, iPad & Mac
  • Export, priority processing, priority support
Try it free for 7 days

Or $8.99 a month. Cancel anytime in iOS Settings.

Pro Monthly $8.99a month
  • Everything in Velo Pro
  • Billed month to month
Try it free for 7 days

More Enhanced Processing: 10 credits for $4.99, 50 for $19.99. Credits never expire.

7-day free trial · Cancel anytime in iOS Settings → Subscriptions

Questions? Answers.

Is Focus Mode speed reading?

No. It's a display technique from reading research, called RSVP: one word at a time on a fixed point. The pace is yours, from a slow focus lock to a quick pass over easy prose.

Does Velo open Kindle or Apple Books titles?

No. Those are locked to their own apps, and Velo won't remove DRM. It reads the DRM-free EPUBs and PDFs you own: papers, reports, textbooks, manuscripts, DRM-free purchases.

What can I import?

EPUB, PDF, text files and web articles. From Files, Safari, Mail or any app's Share Sheet. Scanned PDFs are read by Vision OCR on your device.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Everything is stored on the device, and cloud sync resumes when you reconnect.

What about privacy?

Your books stay on your device for ordinary reading. Content reaches a server only for Enhanced Processing, which you choose per file, or cloud sync, which is encrypted in transit and at rest. No ads, no data sales, no tracking of what you read.

How do I cancel?

In Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions. Apple manages the subscription.

Velo. The best way to read on iOS and Mac.

Three of your own books, every mode and unlimited classics, free. No account.

Download on the App Store Download on the Mac App Store

iPhone, iPad and Mac.