Terms of use
Bouky · last updated 18 September 2026
Bouky is licensed, not sold, under Apple's Standard End User License Agreement. These terms are read together with it rather than instead of it. Using Bouky means agreeing to both.
What the app is
Bouky keeps the words and passages worth keeping from books you read on paper. You photograph a page, the phone reads it, and you choose what to keep. It does not import highlights from ebook readers and it has no account.
Text recognition and the meanings of words are worked out by Apple's own on-device frameworks. Recognition of printed type is very good and it is not perfect, and a meaning written by a model is a reading rather than a ruling: check anything that matters against the page itself, which is why Bouky keeps the photograph beside what you kept. The app is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind.
Meanings need Apple's on-device model, which some devices and some settings do not provide. Where it cannot run, Bouky says which of the two it is, and everything else in the app goes on working.
What is free
Photographing pages and reading them, keeping words and passages, looking up what they mean, the library, search, tags, favourites and exporting the whole collection as a PDF are free, with no advertising anywhere, for the first three books on your shelf.
The subscription and the one-time purchase
- A purchase opens three things: the shelf beyond three books, your library travelling to your other devices through your own iCloud, and the page Bouky writes each morning out of the words you kept.
- There are two plans and no monthly one: a yearly subscription that renews automatically, with seven days free the first time, and a one-time purchase that never renews.
- The subscription renews automatically unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Payment is charged to your Apple Account on confirmation of purchase, or at the end of the free days.
- Prices, periods and the length of the free days are shown inside the app before you buy, in your own storefront's currency, and those are what govern rather than anything on this page.
- The free days are granted once per Apple Account across the subscription group.
- Subscriptions are managed and cancelled in your Apple Account settings, not inside Bouky. Cancelling stops the next renewal and the purchase stays open until the end of the period already paid for.
- Nothing you have kept is ever taken away. If a purchase lapses, the travelling between devices stops and no fourth book may be added. Every word, passage, photograph, note and tag stays exactly where it is, readable, searchable and exportable.
- Refunds are handled solely by Apple, under Apple's own policy. We cannot issue them.
What is yours
Your photographs, the text you kept, your notes, your tags and the names of your shelves are yours. They stay on your device, we hold no copy, and the PDF export exists so that you can take all of it out at any time and keep it somewhere we have nothing to do with.
You are responsible for what you photograph. A book you are reading is very likely under copyright, and keeping a passage for yourself is not the same thing as publishing it. Bouky is a private notebook, and what you do with a passage after you have exported it is between you and whoever holds the rights to it.
What is ours
Bouky's design, its drawings, its lettering, its own words and the arrangement of all of it are ours. The two type families it ships, EB Garamond and Source Sans 3, are under the SIL Open Font License, and the Tabler icon set is under the MIT license; their own terms travel with them.
Not advice
Bouky is a reading notebook. The meanings and translations it shows are generated by a model on your device and are not scholarship, not legal advice, and not a substitute for a dictionary, an editor or a translator where one is actually needed.
If this page changes
These terms may change, and the date at the top changes with them. Going on using Bouky after a change is accepting it.