A Flipboard-like weekly short story magazine launches for the iPad

In what is described as a "Flipboard for short stories", a New York startup called Paragraph has launched the first issue of a weekly short story iPad magazine called Paragraph Shorts.It aggregates short stories from sources across the web, from outlets such as Paris Review, The Moth and The New Yorker, and distributes them through its free iPad app. A story in paidContent reports that the site offers social features including the Twitter and Facebook streams of the stories’ authors and the magazines they were published in. Readers suggest stories. "The core of Paragraph is a community of people like you," the magazine says on its website. "People who like to stop every once in a while, experience an amazing story, and continue with their life, partially changed for the better."

"Paragraph Shorts aims to add value through curation, introducing readers to authors and publications they might not have known about otherwise. “By curating the best short stories, and offering them to people who might not have known they existed, Paragraph will create a link between great literary magazines and readers who are eager to kill fifteen minutes in a quality manner,” Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, said in a statement.

"Of course, killing fifteen minutes reading a short story through an app doesn’t necessarily extend to a subscription to the publication it came from," [reports Laura Hazard Owen]. "But all the stories that Paragraph features are already free online, so the app’s main benefit to the stories’ publishers is to drive traffic to their websites and to increase social media around them. The company is also considering exclusive content at some point."

Paragraph, was founded by Ziv Navoth (who previously ran marketing and partnerships at AOL) and his partner Edo Segal,  and they also run two other businesses -- an e-book app platform called  Holopad and an ebook distribution platform called Convertabook.com.