Say hello (and bonjour) to the new Flipboard for iPad

Flipboard today launched a new version of its wildly popular social app for iPad. Company reps tell us the new app is even “more personal and more beautiful” than before.

Also today, the rep continued, the startup is introducing “more international content and a custom edition of Flipboard for France.”

The iPad app will now include Cover Stories, a popular feature of the Flipboard iOS app for smaller screens including iPhone and iPhone touch. It’s also gotten a few design tweaks to be even more magazine-like, the company said.

Cover Stories allow Flipboard users to to see the most interesting stories from all their sources at a glance. Cover Stories can include images, status updates, blog posts, news articles — you name it. Cover Stories now appear as a “double tile” on the Flipboard iPad app’s first page, and the featured posts will become more relevant over time as you use the app and it “learns” what stories and sources you like best.

On the design side, users will see print-like features, including new covers, typography overlays on photos, and full-bleed images, which the startup said in a statement are intended to “make the social magazine pages resemble the beauty of print design that people love so much even more than before.”

In other features, the app’s Table of Contents now has a third page, bringing the total number of titles to 32; a new “first launch” experience to get new users onboard with a range of topics; and the ability to add entire folders, not just individual feeds, from a Google Reader account.

As for international content, the new app comes with “recommended regional reading” for users in UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, France, Hong Kong and Taiwan and a bespoke app for users in France.