Road Test: Me Books fairy tales

With so many charming children's tales addressing modern issues right now, traditional fairy tales - with their violent content and regressive stereotypes - might be expected to lose some of their allure.

However, American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's influential 1976 study on the usefulness of traditional tales claimed such stories help children cope emotionally with the world.

So are we doing our children a disservice by eschewing the bedtime classics?

Me Books' e-versions of some of the Ladybird favourites of my childhood gave me the chance to experiment with my children's reading.

First I downloaded Little Red Riding Hood. The pages looked like scanned versions of the hard copy, except readers can tap the text to activate narration. Children can also tap the pictures on the accompanying page to make the characters speak a sentence or two.

The publisher has enlisted celebrities, such as Benedict Cumberbatch, as narrators, and the quality of their diction might be an attraction for Hong Kong parents. Users can also record their own voices reading the stories, although this takes a bit of figuring out.