Paragraph Shorts App Reimagines How Readers Discover Short Fiction

Several startups have launched apps and websites in recent years with the goal of driving readers to long-form journalism. Now, one former novelist hopes to do the same for short fiction with a new iPad magazine application called Paragraph Shorts.

The free app, which launched in the iPad Newsstand Thursday, curates short stories from leading literary publications like The New Yorker, Paris Review and Zoetrope to help casual readers discover works of fiction. Each issue of the magazine contains seven short stories and creates more of a multimedia literary experience by including text, audio and video pieces. The debut issue features works by big-name writers like Jonathan Franzen and Etgar Keret, as well as a song by the High Highs that you can have play in the background while reading.

The app was developed by Paragraph, a two-and-a-half year old publishing startup that is part of bMuse, a New York-based incubator focused on media innovation. Paragraph's co-founder and CEO Ziv Navoth has a long resume in the tech world, including executive roles at Bebo and AOL, but it was his experience as a writer that informed his vision for Paragraph Shorts.

On the same day he joined Bebo in 2007, Navoth had his first and only book published. That book, called Nanotales, was a collection of short stories presented in an unusual format with no chapters or page numbers. He tried to promote the collection in bookstores, but was told not to bother "because no one buys books of short stories."

"The more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me that short stories, for most of their history, were locked into these physical vessels. You couldn't publish a short story and sell it to the public," Navoth told Mashable. As he saw it, readers traditionally either had to purchase an anthology or subscribe to literary magazines to get access to short stories, which makes it harder to find and share these works of fiction.

Navoth decided to work on changing this with Paragraph, a startup whose mission statement is to "do to the short story what iTunes did to singles - provide people with a great way to enjoy quality, bite-sized experiences, discovering not only great stories, but great writers." The Shorts magazine is an initial step towards that goal.

Paragraph Shorts only collects short stories from websites that are not behind paywalls, which certainly limits the selection. For example, Navoth estimates that only about 10% to 15% of the short stories published in The New Yorker are available to read in their entirety for free online. Still, that leaves plenty of stories to curate, and the startup has been in touch with publishers to make select paywalled content available for free through the app. The Paris Review has already agreed to take this step.

"Someone else could make the argument that mobile devices are the last nail in the coffin of the short story, but with the right people thinking about it in the right way, there's no reason that the mobile device can't start our renaissance with the short story," said Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review. "It's all the in the execution."

When readers click on stories in the magazine from publications other than The Paris Review, the app first loads the website where the story originally appeared — giving a page view to the publisher — and then offers the option to read a mobile-friendly version within the app. The mobile version is not paginated, which might be nice for longer reads, but users can place a bookmark at any point within the text. There are also options to share stories to Facebook and Twitter, favorite stories from various issues to read later as well as recommendations for similar stories and links to other works from that author.

The hope going forward is that the magazine app will be to use social recommendations to power suggestions for what to read next. Navoth says he's also interested in the idea of opening the magazine up to submissions. The problem, as he puts it, is that then the app might start to turn into more of a traditional literary magazine "with a slush pile of thousands of stories" that someone needs to sort though.

Images courtesy of Paragraph
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