The latest app hoping to get parents to pay a monthly subscription fee to get new stories for their children is Storybiscuit, which launched this week for iPad.

It’s the work of a British company called Storybiscuit, which is promising that its “rich stories and vibrant illustrations introduce different people, creatures and places, igniting children’s imaginations and encouraging them to take a greater interest in the world they live in”.

The app is free and comes with three stories included, with three more added every month for parents paying the £1.99 monthly subscription. If you’d rather not commit to that, you’ll be able to buy the monthly story packs for £2.99 each.

The stories are illustrated with voice narration and music, and they can be read when your iPad isn’t connected to the internet – good for cars, planes and remote holiday cottages!

A blog post on Storybiscuit’s website explains more about what the company is up to:

“Coming up with a name proved to be more challenging than we’d thought. It involved three different whiteboards, a wall of brown paper and a small mountain of post-it notes. In the end we decided that including the word story was fairly crucial given that stories are what the app is all about,” it explains.

“But we also wanted to get across that these are great stories, like story treats if you will, which is where the word biscuit came in. And once we’d combined story and biscuit, we knew we’d found a winner. It’s the only name that gave us that warm, fuzzy feeling - which is the same feeling we hope you get when using the app.”

Some other apps have tried this subscription-stories idea: My Story World, Auracle and Bookboard for example. Much depends on the quality of the stories, so it’s too early to tell if Storybiscuit is here to stay. We’ll be giving the first three stories a try this week for a proper review though.

In the meantime, Storybiscuit is a free download for iPad on Apple’s App Store.