W00t! I got one!! That 100,000-of-a-kind 75th anniversary October Esquire Magazine issue with the very modern e-ink cover. It’s blinking at me now - 2 ½ x 4 1/4 inches of pure modern media.
Esquire teamed up with E-Ink (of Amazon Kindle fame) to create the first ever e-paper magazine cover as a forward look into the future of print (no backward glances in this birthday suit).
The cover has been rumored for a while, and Hearst Corp. (Esquire’s parent) has been working with E-Ink for over two years to make it a reality.
The goal here is making advertising sing – well, at least bling.
Ford Motors defrayed much of the R&D cost, paying a nice premium to have its first-of-a-kind animated E-Ink ad placed on the inside cover. Esquire’s publishers believe this tiny animated billboard on every page is the future (and salvation) for print media advertising. It’s inevitable that as the technology sophisticates e-ink ads – and print content in general - will too. We happen to think the potential – and Esquire’s experiment - is pretty modernly cool.
The cover and Ford’s ad are made up of microchips, batteries and microcapsules thinner than a human hair and covered with a flexible plastic. The microcapsules contain black and white pigments that, when charged, work together to create the images. The batteries should keep the cover blinging for at least three months, but the juice could last as long as six.
We’ll definitely see more of this from Hearst since they have a one-year exclusive from E-Ink – not to mention that Hearst Interactive Media also owns a stake in E-Ink (modern move there, Hearst!).
Once it stops blinging for us, we’ll be putting it into our modern media archives.
And to the 99,999 other lucky Oct. Esquire owners, file this one away. You never know, it might be worth something on eBay someday. If you must toss it, Esquire suggests how to recycle it.
To see what the cover looks like see this video.
To get inside the cover, see Popular Science article, Hacking the Esquire E-ink Cover.
Photo credit – Folio Magazine
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