Books with "Naughty" characters are such a draw for kids, particularly if they're well behaved and like to live vicariously through mischievous naughty characters in stories.

Meet "The Naughty Bus", a bright red London Routemaster bus who is curious, loves to explore - and above all loves to misbehave. There's nowhere he won't drive in search of fun and adventure, even the breakfast table isn't sacred!

Author Jan Oke wants to tell you a story!

In Jan and Jerry Oke's first book for Inky Sprat, Jan tells a cheeky tale about the bus and his adventures, with Jerry Oke's fabulous photographic illustrations to compliment the story. Children can choose to have Jan read each page, or can flick through themselves on the iPad to see what that naughty bus gets up to!

We could see this turning into a series (in fact there's almost a gift of a sequel in this - we want to know more about the brave and strong tow-truck who pops up to save that naughty bus from a watery fate!)



Join the Naughty Bus on his adventures through the iTunes Book Store, released tomorrow, 21st March 2014 priced £2.99.

Charlotte's best bit: The Naughty Bus driving through beans on toast! Very naughty!

Daddy's Favourite bit: A nice paced book that's sure to be a huge wow with tiddlers everywhere, particularly those who can't resist a big cheeky red bus!

(Kindly sent to us for review by Inky Sprat. iPad Version Tested)

Wow, this is definitely something distinctly different and unique. Inky Sprat are firm favourites with us for their brilliant treatments of print books. Here though they've picked a book that I thought would be nigh-on impossible to adapt to the e-book format without some serious planning and manipulation.

For a bit of background, Wayne Anderson's original book had a fairly unique format - spiral bound with pages that flip and combine, so that the illustrations could be transformed into 8000 combinations - representing the guests at a fabulous wedding for a witch and a magician.

Here's a photo of the original book...

"The Perfect Match" by Wayne Anderson. Beautiful, puzzling, enigmatic

Inky Sprat have harnessed the power of your iPad to represent this idea of flipping pages and combining characters' clothing, faces, bodies, hats and the surrounding scenery - the ultimate aim is to find the Magician and the Witch, who form the shape of a heart once you track down the clues within the text to what they're wearing and how they look.

So rather than a standard E-Book it's more like a puzzle game. You can read all about the guests in handy little sliding snippets on one page, and then do your best to build up the different pictures of guests on another - or do what we did and just go crazy making fabulous combinations and fitting bits together.

It's probably something that I'd gauge as being more suitable for older children, because at times Charlotte struggled with the format a bit (I'm not sure what could be done to keep the original spirit of the book intact but perhaps make the navigation and sliding a bit more intuitive to use - counter-directional arrows that point one way when you're sliding the panels another way really did confuse both of us!)

It is a thing of beauty to behold though, largely due to Wayne's imaginative and unique illustrative style and the fabulous characters he creates (definitely worth dropping by his website and taking a look at his gallery of work).

"The Perfect Match" by Wayne Anderson and Inky Sprat is available on iTunes, priced at £2.99


Charlotte's best bit: Making lots of silly combinations of characters.

Daddy's Favourite bit: Slick presentation but with some tweaks needed here and there to the UI, fabulous artwork and characters though.

(Kindly sent to us for review by Manus at Inky Sprat)

Though we said we were taking a back seat with the app reviews and e-book reviews, we could not possibly resist the lure of the mighty Babette Cole and her new series of iBooks, developed and published by Inky Sprat.

"The Trouble With" series is absolutely chock full of all the things we love about Babette's books, and as a bonus you get to see (and hear) the wonderful lady herself narrating her own works. What's not to love? (We can't get enough of Babette's groovy outfits!)

So in "The Trouble With Gran" we find out what happens when a young lad accompanies his Gran and her friends on a day away. Not to a lovely sunny holiday destination but to a fairly grotty seaside town. Ew!

There is definitely something different about Gran though. In truth, she's not the quiet mild mannered old lady she seems. She's actually....AN ALIEN!

Gran's not at all happy with the choice of day-trip destination, so in true Granny style she starts to misbehave (oh how we identify with this. My lovely 92 year old Nan may not come from Planet Koosbain but she knows how to play up!)

Sneakily morphing into her true form, manipulating objects and folk with her magic powers and generally ensuring the day is made a little more 'interesting' throughout, Gran eventually tires of the whole thing and performs one last act of alienesque rebellion!

We'll let you find out what that is. We sometimes struggle with the iBook format - keeping Charlotte's attention on e-books of any kind on the iPad is always tricky - but this was absorbing and engaging, and as fans of Babette's fantastic books we just couldn't get enough.

The lady herself is busy beavering away on the next Doctor Dog picture book - so stay tuned for more from her very soon. In the meantime, check these out, they're ace!

The Trouble with Gran (from Inky Sprat on iTunes for iPad)

(See the rest of Babette's awesome iBook range here!)

Charlotte's best bit: Gran's rather ooh-la-la behaviour at the glamorous granny competition

Daddy's favourite bit: So awesome to see and hear Babette narrating these books. She rocks!

(iBook code kindly provided by Inky Sprat for review)