Esquire Magazine is keeping itself trendy and cool, by releasing the world’s first digital cover.

Chuffed : A past cover of Esquire Magazine
Not too dissimilar to Monica Lewinsky’s mental image of Bill Clinton

They’re using a very clever paper-thin electronic display, similar to Amazon’s Kindle book reader.

This, from FutureSpace.co.za:

To commemorate its 75th anniversary, the October issue of Esquire will feature a flexible electronic “paper” cover that allows words and images to scroll across it—a first for magazines, according to parent company Hearst.

“We decided to dedicate our 75th anniversary issue not to the magazine’s past but to our culture’s near future,” editor-in-chief David Granger said in an interview with FOLIO:. To pull it off, the magazine tapped E Ink, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based electronic paper display technologies firm that developed the electronic paper display [EPD] technology for Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. The result, Granger said, is “a very literal representation of our theme: ‘The 21st Century Begins Now.’”

Those words will flash across the cover of 100,000 copies when it hits newsstands in September.

Microcapsules Thinner Than a Human Hair

Development of the EPD cover began about two years ago, according to Granger, when he and his team, with the developers at E Ink, began discussing how to create a flexible electronic cover. Hearst Interactive Media acquired a stake in E Ink about seven years ago.

[click here to read more]

Surely it won’t be long before they’re featuring this technology on condoms? Can you imagine revealing a scrolling sign saying something like, “CAUTION: OBJECTS ARE LARGER THAN THEY APPEAR – HANDLE WITH CARE?”

Now that’s good humour.

[thanks charl]