A couple of weeks ago I heard about how Esquire was planning on using E-Ink technology on the cover of one of their upcoming issues and the video above shows that result. E-Ink technology has been experimented with for a few years now and is currently being used on various book readers such as the Amazon Kindle, but this marks the first time it has been used on disposable medium such as a magazine. Ford apparently forked out a big amount of money to make this happen and as you can see in the video they used the technology on one of their ads on the first page spread. 

While this isn’t as visually exciting as the ads from Minority Report, it’s a step towards that kind of reality and I think as the technology matures we’ll be seeing more examples like this in the wild. Someday magazines might be a single sheet of material like this and be completely interactive in displaying it’s content. Imagine being able to interact with the articles you read such as reading and leaving comments that sync to an external site or having dynamic ways to be able to dive deeper into the subject matter you’re learning about. Maybe editors could make corrections remotely or update their content if new content becomes available after the magazine has reach newstands. 

Then again I shudder to think of walking past a magazine rack and having all of the covers vying for my attention. Who knows how outrageous they could get. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if Playboy or Penthouse got on board with this technology.

E-Ink technology though opens doors far beyond the magazine rack, so it’ll be interesting to see how it gets applied.