A young visitor reads a comic on a tablet computer at the 63rd Frankfurt Book Fair October 13, 2011.JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP / Getty Images
Ask any parent who has recently bought an iPad and one of the first things they will tell you is how much their children love playing with the device. An international study this year suggested that while only 9 per cent of pre-school children can tie their shoelaces, about 20 per cent can play an app on a smartphone.
"Hand-eye co-ordination allows a child to use a tablet from around nine months onward," says Gary Pope, co-founder of Kids Industries, the children's research consultancy. "There is clearly a huge emerging market here."
It is little surprise, therefore, that publishers and media companies are increasingly looking at producing content for tablets and phones that is aimed specifically at children.
HarperCollins says it will have about 25 to 30 apps available for children by the end of the year, while Penguin, which is owned by Pearson, parent company of the Financial Times, recently announced plans for a number of new interactive children's books for the iPad, including an app based on the Tale of Peter Rabbit. The company has an in-house app development team.
Earlier this year, Bertelsmann also bought Smashing Ideas, the app developer, to create an in-house apps team at its Random House publishing company.
Bayard Presse, the French magazine group, recently launched an iPad-based version of its magazine, StoryBox, for children as young as three.
Disney has launched a series of toys called App Mates, which interact with the touch screen of the iPad. The first set features the vehicles from the Cars animated films, which children can race across scenes on the iPad screen.
The children's app market is so new that there are few estimates of its size. A study of 2,200 iPad-owning parents in the U.S. and the U.K., carried out by Kids Industries, found that parents downloaded an average of 27.2 apps for their children each year, spending about $100 in total.
Given that Gartner, the technology research group, expects some 63.6 million tablet devices to be sold this year, there is clearly a very big opportunity emerging.
"We saw this as a fantastic opportunity and started thinking about how to use the features of the touch screen to tell stories differently," said Kate Wilson, founder of Nosy Crow, a children's publisher that has been one of the pioneers in children's apps.
"Children are using these devices and as publishers we have a duty to take those reading experiences to where the children are," she said. "It is important we do this, otherwise someone else will. We can't leave this to the geeks.
"This is not to say that the bedtime story won't still be best delivered in a calm, quiet, paper-based way. But if children are spending time on these devices they need to have reading experiences that are as exciting as playing games," she added.
One of the alluring things about the children's market is that the prices can be a lot higher than for standard apps. Nosy Crow's highly-acclaimed Cinderella app, for example, sells for £5.49, compared with prices of about 59p for many apps on the iTunes store. Kids Industries found that U.K. parents were willing to pay up to $4.22 for a high-quality app.
"Especially if something is seen as educational, you can charge a lot more for it," Mr. Pope said. "For the younger end of the market education is a primary decision-making driver."
However, for publishers there is a paradox: $4.22 is much lower than they would generally charge for a much simpler e-book, read on a devices such as a Kindle or Nook. Yet an app with interactive graphics and sound costs much more to make – anywhere between $5,000 to $100,000 depending on its complexity.
"Publishers will make more e-books and fewer apps because of the pricing," says Corinne Helman, vice-president of digital publishing at HarperCollins. She says it is still difficult to reach profitability with complex apps and is waiting to see wider adoption of tablets before HarperCollins pushes further development in this area.
Big brands are the ones that do best in the apps marketplace, with parents naturally gravitating towards titles that they know. Ms. Helman says HarperCollins' app based on the Fancy Nancy series is a bestseller, despite the fact that the interactivity is very basic.
However, everyone in the industry agrees that simply "squashing books into apps" is not enough and not all books work well in an interactive format. Well-known children's authors such as Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, have been famously reluctant to take their titles into this format, partly for fear it could turn out damaging for the brand.
Mr. Pope says while the genre is still so experimental, such caution is justified.
"A digital interface is very different from a paper one," says Mr. Pope. "And I think there is a lack of understanding about how consumers use these things. It doesn't help that the interactive editor at publishing companies is usually 24 years old and the closest they have been to a kid is their nephew in Manchester. It is not enough."