Wonderful tool to encourage children to write. – Fairy Tale Review

My daughter (7 years old) has shown an interest in writing. She would fold paper into a booklet form, illustrate and write short stories (about 8 pages). We found this tool and she is extremely excited about creating her own works she can share. Features I like: Well, I like just about everything they put into this but I particularly like the fact you can use the illustration objects from the sample books. They are generic enough to allow the illustrator to create new illustrations that don't have anything to do with the original sample...kudos. I also like the "in-app" purchase model. Come one, can we as consumers really expect software developers to put out quality software for free? The fact that I can get a fully functional product with sample objects and get started creating original illustrated e-books is wonderful. The expectation that more libraries of object coming in the or of books that I purchase to not only get the story...reading material for my daughter but at the same time get a library of objects for her to use in her own works...brilliant! Absolutely I will pay a reasonable price for in-app purchased books. The ability to duplicate a sample book for the writer / illustrator to modify as they see fit gives them a jump start...again, a stroke of genius. Oh, and many of the objects in the object library are animated. Ok, so its not all roses. There are a couple of things that could be better: 1. At first glance the bookshelf is a bit confusing. I had expected that it would simply integrate with my existing iBookshelf. It doesn't seem to. It appear as though it creates its own bookshelf. The only point here is that this is a bit confusing. If it is, in fact creating its own bookshelf...and I have other apps that do that....that's fine but you would want a way to distinguish it from the iPad shipped bookshelf. The other apps, and Apple themselves, have done this by changing the color of the bookcase. 2. Now here's the biggie. My daughter creates her own artwork. The images are stored in iPhoto on the iPad. There is no way with the current version (that I could find so far....and I did read the manual that came with Fairy Tale) to import her own artwork. In spite of these two shortcomings I would still recommend. Heck, I think this would also be a terrific app for grown-ups. Although I suspect that their other app iBookcreator is the app with the image import feature. Maybe they could distinguish the two; one based on the ability to import images and the other with the ability to create and import illustrations / animation a la Adobe Illustrator type files.
Review by Mark Delaplane on Fairy Tale.