Digital Trends

Esquire Magazine plans to announce the dawn of the 21st century with a battery-powered flashing E-Ink cover on 100,000 copies of its September issue.

Esquire magazine, a long-time staple publication devoted to…well, OK, we don't know what, but it seems to involve glamor photos of female celebrities, pop culture, and alcohol—is making new play to capture eyeballs on magazine racks across America: 100,000 copies of the publication's September 2008 issue will be distributed to newsstands with a flashing, battery-powered cover featuring E-Ink technology, the same stuff used to drive the Amazon Kindle and other devices. The cover will (somewhat belatedly) proclaim "The 21st Century Begins Now"…at least into the batteries run out after a few months.

Esquire editor in chief David Granger has apparently been pursuing the idea of an electronic cover for years, and apparently sees the possibilities of E-Ink and similar technologies as a revolutionary frontier for print media. He also tells The New York Times that he has hopes for the cover winding up in the Smithsonian…albeit perhaps connected to a more permanent power supply.

Esquire sees this first electronic cover as a "1.0" effort, with more advanced implementations sure to come as the technology and battery technology advance. Esquire purportedly invested significant money developing the small battery to be used in the magazine…and then set about recruiting a top-tier advertiser to help bankroll the effort. Esquire was eventually able to land Ford for inside cover advertising.

Esquire has an exclusive lock on the use of E-Ink's technology in print through 2009, and hopes to come up with new ideas for the technology other than just flashy covers.

The 100,000 electronic covers will be available on newstands; Esquire's 600,000+ subscribers will receive ordinary covers.