We’ve known for some time that the cover of Esquire magazine’s October issue would incorporate an E Ink electrophoretic display. On Monday, E Ink and Esquire released more details through an article by Erich Schwartzel in the Boston Globe.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

The cover design is being kept under wraps until next week, but Esquire did reveal the cover will incorporate a rectangular E Ink section that says "Welcome to the 21st century." The display is powered by a battery with a lifetime of at least six months.

Only 100,000 copies of the magazine intended for newsstands — including Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores - will have the E Ink covers; the other 600,000 copies will have conventional covers. Buyers of the Esquire will pay $5.99 instead of the normal newsstand price of $3.99, but that’s a bargain. The incremental cost for the E Ink covers is between eight and ten dollars per copy. That will be subsidized by a Ford Motor Company ad on the inside cover for the new Ford Flex, with moving E Ink lines to indicate motion.

The combination of E Ink and traditional paper made fabrication more difficult, said E Ink Marketing VP Sriram Peruvemba, but he expressed satisfaction with the project and the results. Ethan Goller, President of Structural Graphics, noted in comments to a blog that his company produced the cover for Esquire, and that the E Ink displays were inserted by hand into the covers at a maquiladora the company owns in Mexico. Peruvemba said seven bindery tests were performed to assure the partners that the E Ink display would survive bindery operations.

This is obviously an expensive adventure, but October marks Esquire’s 75th anniversary, and the magazine wanted to make a dramatic statement about the issue’s theme - the 21st century starts now, said Esquire Editor-in-Chief David Granger. The fact that Hearst Corp., Esquire’s parent company, is also an E Ink investor might have made the decision easier.

Grand, not-quite-practical gestures are often important in moving technology forward. Lindbergh’s non-stop flight across the Atlantic did not instantly make trans-Atlantic air travel practical, but trans-Atlantic airliners came sooner as a result. Will Esquire have even a small portion of The Spirit of St. Louis’s galvanizing effect? We’ll see. But whether it does or not, E Ink and Esquire are placing a new ePaper model before us: not ePaper as a replacement for traditional ink and paper, but ePaper as adding dynamic content to a primarily traditional paper publication. That is genuinely interesting.