The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter’s 1902 classic, as an interactive storybook

The whole story, word for word, with the twenty-six watercolours Beatrix Potter painted for it.

Download on the App Store

For iPad and iPhone

What’s inside

  • The complete 1902 tale, all 950 of Potter’s words across twenty-seven pages
  • Her own twenty-six watercolours, and twenty-five of them do something
  • Sweep leaves off a buried picture, and rub the grey away to bring her colour back
  • Grow blackberries on the bramble, pull radishes out of the bed, find five little shoes
  • Send the sparrows off the page, ring the pond, rattle the flower-pots, rebuild a picture as a puzzle
  • Read-aloud narration that highlights each word as it is spoken
  • Pages that turn with a real page-curl

What isn’t

  • No advertising
  • No in-app purchases and no subscription
  • No accounts and no sign-in
  • No analytics and no tracking of any kind
  • No internet — the app has no networking code at all

A few pages

A page half covered in autumn leaves, with Mrs Rabbit and her basket showing through where they have been swept away
Sweep the leaves away and find her underneath.
Mrs Rabbit buttoning Peter's coat, the picture partly grey and partly in full watercolour where a finger has rubbed
Rub the grey away and her own colour comes back.
A white cat sitting beside a pond of goldfish and lily pads, with rings spreading on the water
Touch the water, and the rings keep coming.
One of Potter's garden pictures broken into sliding tiles, part way through being put back in order
Three of the pages come apart as a sliding puzzle.

Where it comes from

The Tale of Peter Rabbit was printed privately in 1901 and published in full colour in 1902. Beatrix Potter wrote it and painted it, so one copyright clock governs the words and the pictures together: she died in 1943, and the book has been in the public domain across the world since the end of 2013. The plates in this app are her own watercolours, scanned and restored rather than redrawn.

Get in touch

Questions, trouble with the app, or something you’d like to see in it — write in, and you’ll hear back from the person who made it.

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