Last updated: 28 September 2026
InkShorts: AI Book Summaries is made by Ankharis Ltd (United Kingdom).
InkShorts has no accounts and never asks for your name, email address or location. Your reading history stays on your devices and in your own private iCloud storage. When you open a book that isn’t already summarised, listen to a summary, ask a question about a book, or scan a book, the details needed to do that are sent to the services listed below, and nothing that identifies you goes with them.
Your reading history, saved books, reading progress, cached book covers and your language setting are stored on your iPhone or iPad.
If you're signed in to iCloud, the list of books you've opened (title, author, language, saved flag and reading progress, not the summaries) and your remaining monthly book allowance are also kept in your own private iCloud storage (iCloud key-value storage). That lets your history and free rereads follow you to your other devices and survive reinstalling the app. Only you can see this data; Ankharis Ltd can't. Clearing your history in the app clears it on all your devices.
When you search for a book, InkShorts sends the title or search text and your app language through our server (hosted by Cloudflare) to OpenAI, which identifies the book and writes the summary. When you ask a follow-up question about a book, your question, the book’s title and author and your language are sent the same way. If a book has no published cover, its title and author are sent to OpenAI to create cover artwork. Our server passes these requests on and does not keep them. OpenAI does not use data sent through its API to train its models and may keep it for up to 30 days to detect abuse (see the OpenAI Privacy Policy).
Your questions and the answers to them are not saved anywhere except on your device while the chat is open.
When you listen to a summary, the summary text and your language are sent through our server to Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, which turns it into audio (see the Google Privacy Policy). The summary text is the book summary itself; it contains nothing about you.
To make summaries and audio faster for everyone, a generated summary and its audio are saved in a shared database in Apple’s iCloud (CloudKit public database), keyed only by the book title and language. The searches people type are also saved there, anonymously, so we can see which books to add to the built-in library. None of this is stored with your name or Apple ID, and other people can’t see who searched for what.
Covers: the app looks up cover images by book title on Open Library, a free public book catalogue run by the Internet Archive, and saves them on your device.
Barcodes: the barcode is read on your device, and only the ISBN number is sent to Open Library to find the book.
Cover photos: if you photograph a book cover, the photo is sent through our server to OpenAI only to read the book’s title. Photos are never stored by us and are not saved to the shared iCloud database. The camera is used only while the scanner is open, and only after you allow it.
The “buy” link opens an Amazon search for the book in your browser. InkShorts doesn’t send Amazon anything about you, and what happens on Amazon’s site is covered by Amazon’s privacy notice.
Premium subscriptions are processed entirely by Apple through the App Store. Ankharis Ltd never receives your payment details. The app only learns which plan you have, so it can set your monthly book allowance. You can manage or cancel your subscription in Settings → [your name] → Subscriptions.
There is no advertising in InkShorts and no analytics service. The app does not track you across other apps or websites, does not use the advertising identifier (IDFA), and does not show the App Tracking Transparency prompt.
InkShorts is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.
Because we don’t hold data that identifies you, there is usually nothing for us to find, export or delete. To remove your reading history everywhere, use Library › Clear history; to remove everything InkShorts keeps on a device, delete the app. If you have a question about your data under UK data protection law, contact us at the address below.
If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted at this address with a new “last updated” date.
Questions about privacy in InkShorts: ankharis.ltd@gmail.com