Esquire magazine, a venerable men’s magazine, will celebrate its 75th birthday that year by becoming the first print magazine to utilize electronic paper.

The technology, from Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink, will allow words and images to scroll across the front cover of its October issue. The back of the cover will feature a double-page ad for the Flex car from the cover’s sponsor, Ford.

21st Century Starts Now

David Granger, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, said the cover will demonstrate that “the 21st century begins that fall.” The magazine, which is known for the quality of its writing, will be devoted to exploring “ideas, society and issues” in that century.

Representatives from the magazine and its parent company, Hearst, contracted with E Ink last summer to create a version of its electronic-paper technology, a scheme of which is already used for e-book/e-newspaper products like Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader.

Hearst’s manufacturing division and E Ink worked to address

the challenges of mass manufacturing a cover for the magazine. Ford was brought into the project after it was underway.

But the 21st century issue will have a limited reach. The special cover will only be available on 100,000 issues to be offered at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and selected newsstands.

Trying To Get into Mainstream

Andrew Frank, an analyst with industry research firm Gartner, said E Ink is “one of those technologies that has been struggling” to get into the mainstream for quite a while, and that it “probably still has a towering road” before it becomes widespread.

But, he added, the Esquire cover could point toward “a vision” of publishing and technology that begins to merge Web, print and video/TV. Frank indicated that print magazines could be a key portal for E Ink, since the industry “still maintains an outsized proportion of advertising spend” and the technology could be…

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