Esquire, E-Ink: Future of Print?

Kevin Maney writes: Can't wait to see what the cover of Esquire's 75th anniversary issue looks like. I'd heard about this a month or so ago from an Esquire editor: This will be the world's first magazine cover to use E-Ink's technology, so the text and images on the page can actually change, flash, animate, whatever. It's extremely expensive at this point, so only 100,000 of 720,000 issues will be made with the E-Ink cover -- only for newsstand sales. (Subscribers, like me, get cut out of this deal!)

E-Ink makes the display technology for Amazon.com's Kindle. The company, which has been around for 11 years, has longed pressed the vision of "electronic print" -- a magazine or newspaper that looks and feels much like the original paper versions, except the pages are all E-Ink pages that can change. Pick up your E-Ink newspaper off the coffee table in the morning, and it will be updated with that day's edition via wireless networks. Pick it up an hour later, and breaking news will be refreshed.

Personally, I think it's a cool-sounding vision that will never happen. It will on something like a Kindle, but not in a form factor like a 100-page broadsheet newspaper. Still, E-Ink is probably going to play an interesting role in the future of print media. The Esquire experiment will be seen as a first step.