Someone had to do it first. For Esquire Magazine, I give a wholehearted congratulations on being the first magazine to feature an electronic ink cover. It had to start somewhere, and it's rarely successful the first time around when revolutionary technologies are introduced to the masses. Full review after the jump!

Photo by just_mike

Esquire cleared a big hurdle by delivering a large circulation -- 100,000 strong -- of their publication to market with (mostly) intact embedded e-ink covers. Delivery on this scale is indeed an impressive feat. And it mostly ends there.

There are many more hurdles to surpass.

In order to get these magazines on shelves and animating correctly, Esquire had to ship them in refrigerated trucks. I imagine a fleet of Safeway shipping trailers; stacks of eggs, veggies, and milk on the left, magazines on the right. The cost of refrigeration for shipping magazines seems wasteful to me. But this is the price of advancing technology, and I understand that.

The cover itself is not completely e-ink; rather, two e-ink panels are sandwiched between a folded piece of cardstock. Two die-cuts are made in the cardstock to display the panels. I've produced a few magazines so I know that the cover is the most expensive piece to print. The more tricks you incorporate into it, the pricier it gets. Printing a magazine cover that is 1/3 wider than usual, has one additional fold, and two die-cuts is an exercise in insanity. Mad respect for the designers on this front. Add to that the placement of fairly delicate electronics, gluing and then performing a fold -- mad respect to the pressmen. After all is said and done this becomes a very expensive production process.

In order to underwrite the costs of this undertaking the second e-ink panel, on the inside cover, contains an advertisement for Ford. Without their sponsorship to keep the magazines per-unit cost down, this project would probably never have made it to the shelves.

I checked out the magazine shelves at my local bookstore and inspected several of these Esquire editions. Many of them had tears at the corners of the die-cuts, and all of them had visible dimple embossing from the circuit boards due to the pressure of several magazines stacked on each other during shipping. A few had ripped bindings. Out of the dozen or so magazines I inspected, only a few were in good condition.

Detail of the e-ink panels and circuitry. Photo by just_mike

Onto the design of the panels themselves. There is really nothing inspiring about them at all. Words and pictures flash on and off. It reminds me of old signage that used to light up in succession, directing you to the best burger in town... "Best" flashes, then "Burgers," then an arrow flashes on and off a few times -- you get the idea. No motion is involved, it is all static imagery. It will be some time before truly amazing advances in this area, but hackers are already doing some very interesting things with the panels. These guys created a clock from the panel. It's rather esoteric but loads more interactive than what Esquire accomplished. Wired's Gadget Lab blog proposes a great idea for the panels.

I imagine when this technology becomes fully integrated, we'll all have a e-ink page in our bags, suitcases, snuggled next to our laptops, or perhaps even folded up in our pockets. We will walk up to a magazine kiosk and download the latest issue of Esquire onto our page. The cover will come alive, whatever celebrity adorning the cover will walk around it, pull letters out of a bag at their feet and place the nameplate and headlines in the space around him. Perhaps they will practice kung-fu. You will press a button in the bottom corner, and the page will begin to flip, your celebrity will wave -- not goodbye, but see you later -- on page 54.

Truly, e-ink technology will be revolutionary and will eliminate a major source of natural resource consumption while adding an amazing level of interactivity. The amount of paper used for printing is staggering, and when these products have run their course they often wind up in a landfill. Even those that are recycled require a large amount of energy to re-process, off-setting much of the benefits.

Esquire made a big step with their cover. Someone had to do it. Unfortunately, I don't see the benefits outweighing the costs.

Lastly, lets talk semantics. E-ink, e-ink, E ink, E-paper, e-paper, or ePaper? Google them all, and they all return results. Before much more saturation of this phenomenal technology happens we need to all agree on its name!

Source:
Esquire to geeks: hack our e-paper magazine cover