It’s a very exciting day for us, as our first e-book is now available on Apple’s iBooks store. It’s called Apps Playground’s 100 Best iPad Apps for Kids: 2013 Edition.

We spent all of December learning to use Apple’s iBooks Author software and working on the book, as our first attempt at publishing in that format. The book is a collection of our favourite apps for children from last year split into categories: education, stories, creativity, playful and games.

The book is available for iPad and Mac only at the moment: we’re thinking about an iPhone version, but since the content is focused on iPad apps, we hope it’s not too much of a problem. It costs £1.99 on the iBooks store.

It’s part of our wider ambitions for this site, which we started as a spare-time project in 2010 because a.) we had iPads and b.) we had a three year-old eager to use them. Over time, it’s grown steadily – in December, we attracted just over 64,000 visitors to the site – and we’ve been spending more time finding, playing with and writing about apps for it.

From the start, we knew we never wanted to charge app developers to be written about, and that remains the case. Instead, we make money from a mixture of Google ads and affiliate fees when people buy paid apps from our articles. The launch of this iBook is a third strand that we hope will help us continue to put more time and investment into Apps Playground.

Anyway, if you buy the book, we hope you like it – if you do (or, indeed, if you don’t) you can leave a review on the iBooks store, which will help others decide whether it’s right for them. And stand by for more from us in the coming weeks and months, as we continue seeking out the best apps for kids on all manner of devices.

Also, we’d like to thank Linda from Top Floor Design in our hometown for the fab cover design and photo-shoot, and also freelance designer Laura Kalbag who did such a marvellous job on our website redesign, which gave us the confidence to press ahead with the e-book.