The artwork isn’t nearly as arresting as that of Morris Lessmore, but it is beautiful in its own right, and the interactions are engaging. If you touch a character’s image, for instance, it acts out a fragment of the plot. But a character will sometimes react to the actions or words of another character, so if you tap them in the incorrect sequence you’re rewarded with non sequiturs.

The text occasionally includes highlighted ballet terms that, when tapped, yield a printed and narrated explanation of the term. It would be nice to see that feature extended to more words that could trip up early readers.

The newest book apps on my list, Oh the Thinks You Can Think! and Cars 2, fairly represent the market’s approach to new readers. Oh the Thinks is conventional Seuss fare. The illustrations aren’t animated, but the images move subtly across the page to enliven the graphics. Like other book apps for early readers, Oh the Thinks highlights each word as the narrator reads it. But if you tap important characters or images from the story, the narrator speaks the operative word — “wall,” for instance — and an animated rendering of the word pops out at the reader.

I’ll let literacy specialists and parents debate the pedagogical merits of this approach, but my immediate impression was that it probably couldn’t hurt.

Cars 2 is more entertainment (and, arguably, media branding) than children’s literature. That will suit many parents and children just fine, of course, but a beginning reader can sometimes lose the text in the wash of animation, music and sound effects. As with many other book apps for children, this one includes a coloring book option, simulated jigsaw puzzles and games for many pages. In other words, it’s more app than book.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad way to see the genre at the moment — more app than book, but the book is gaining.