The most famous first-hand account of the Holocaust, Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, is being brought to life as an iPhone and Android app by Wellington company TradeMobile.

The company has now largely shifted to Britain but still has its registered head office in the capital where it was founded seven years ago, and about half its 49 shareholders are New Zealanders.

Director Jen Porter, who lives in London, said it had teamed up with publishers Viking and Penguin to create the "book app", which will be published next month.

Like a DVD with "special  features", the app will include the text of the book along with extras such as interactive scans of the original pages of the diary, including Frank's sketches and scribbles, videos of people who secretly helped her, and contemporary radio broadcasts. It will also include previously unreleased material from the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam, TradeMobile said.

Porter said TradeMobile had formed a "long-term partnership" with Penguin to create other book apps, using a multimedia platform it had developed called BeyondTheStory, and was working with other publishers in Britain.

Next year it would release the technology as a cloud-based software service that publishers could use to create book apps themselves.

- © Fairfax NZ News