Flipboard Transforms News Reading Into Cozy, Interactive Experience

How many magazines do you have next to your toilet? A dozen? A couple? Or have you cancelled all your magazine subscriptions?

During a time of rapid transformation in the news industry, it has been said that digital news will only really usurp print news once you can read it on the toilet.

With Flipboard, that day may have finally come.

The app, available on iPads, employs a simply concept: Take a  news website—chock full of photos, videos and articles but designed for a mouse and a monitor—and reformat it into a cleaner, simpler, magazine-style template.

The Palo-Alto based company announced this morning that it has partnered with a number of leading news companies to test the "iPadified" experience.

Here's how it works: When selected stories from ABC News, All Things Digital, Bon Appetit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SF Chronicle/Gate, Uncrate or The Washington Post Magazine are shared on Twitter or Facebook, a Flipboard user simply double-taps the excerpt to open that article as a magazine-style spread.  

"We believe that the timeless principles of print can enhance the social media experience, not only to make content more discoverable but also to make it easier to read," said Mike McCue, Flipboard CEO. "Now working with publishers, we can re-imagine Web pages as magazine articles, connecting readers more deeply with the publisher's brand while opening up entirely new advertising possibilities."

Flipboard bills itself as "the world's first social magazine" and draws inspiration from what it describes as the "beauty and ease of print media."

Based on Patch tests, news content from Flipboard's news partners does display nicely, and flipping through the pages effectively recreates the "feel" of thumbing through a magazine.

The real question is: When will Patch be offered up as a Flipboard news partner?