MagLoft lets anyone become an e-magazine publisher

Nick Martin (left) and MagLoft team

There is no doubt that blogs, tablets, smartphones, and the internet have changed the way we consume media. Music junkies used to wait for their Rolling Stone to arrive via snail mail. Now they go to Pitchfork. Gearheads used to scour supermarkets for the latest car magazines. Now, there’s Autoblog.

But with limitless information at the push of a button, a new generation of readers has also become more difficult to please. Sometimes, they still want that nostalgic magazine experience with long articles and authentic photography, but without the chore of hunting down a hard copy.

Nick Martin is the Danish-English founder of MagLoft, an e-magazine publishing startup based out of Michael Boedekaer’s Liv.it co-working space in Gianyar, Bali. Martin is not the first entrepreneur to build a startup in the digital self-publishing space, but he is one of the few to do so in Indonesia with a service aimed at users around the world.

Stripped down publishing

MagLoft’s user experience is relatively simple compared to sophisticated competing platforms like Mag+ or Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. MagLoft lets users choose templates, drag-and-drop content, and make adjustments via one toolbar at the top of the screen. Users can jump around the project from page to page with an integrated drop-down menu that shows the pages in order.

MagLoft’s other competitors include AppzineMachine, PressPadApp, and Issue Stand. Martin says these companies offer simple solutions, but limit users to PDF files. According to Martin, PDFs are great for getting started quickly, but the format doesn’t provide interactive options, and is not optimal for smartphone reading.

“Recent statistics show a shift from tablets to smartphones when it comes to consuming magazines,” Martin says. “This is where MagLoft shines and stands out, as we have our unique drag-and-drop editor for interactive and responsive content. Our competitors are also priced two to ten times higher.”

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Keeping up with the news

A PricewaterhouseCoopers report says that by 2018 digital magazines will become a US$5.7 billion market. Martin claims current market growth is around 37 percent per annum, and says he is encouraged by Apple’s September acquisition of Prss, a direct competitor of MagLoft.

“We are especially excited about this as MagLoft offers the same features as Prss did before they got acquired,” Martin explains. “We have also seen the company Liquid-State win awards and receive a lot of funding lately, which is a true testament of investor interest in our space.”

Martin wrote the first line of code for MagLoft in June 2013, but the company claims to still be in beta. Martin says MagLoft currently has around 500 registered users, and admits that only about 20 percent of those users are active, meaning they’ve created at least one magazine. Martin explains, “Many of these have already been published in the Apple Newsstand and others are still building their profiles and getting ready to publish. We have set up clever in-app analytics to measure and fully understand what our users love or hate. That also allows us to target inactive users with follow-up emails, and leverage active users with individual promotions and services.”