Monday, September 8, 2008

Esquire's E-Ink Cover



"Digital technology holds the promise of making the dissemination of information much easier and cheaper — no paper, no trucks — but this experiment by Esquire was the opposite.

'The whole chain had to be reinvented,' said Peter Griffin, the deputy editor. 'The interesting thing is it has almost nothing to do with the normal way of putting out a magazine.'

First Esquire had to make a six-figure investment to hire an engineer in China to develop a battery small enough to be inserted in the magazine cover. The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine’s distributor in Glazer, Ky.

'We are trying to combine a 21st-century technology with a 19th-century manufacturing process,' Mr. Granger said.

All of this, of course, is expensive. Which is why it was necessary for Esquire to find a sponsor. In stepped Ford Motor, which will have an advertisement on the inside of the cover that will use the same technology to promote its new minivan-sport utility vehicle, the Flex.

'We wanted the marketing plan for this vehicle to include motion as much as possible,' said Usha Raghavachari, communications manager for S.U.V.’s for Ford North America Marketing. 'We had a desire to make our marketing launch as unique as the vehicle. This makes our print plan a little more energizing.'

Esquire has exclusive use of E Ink’s technology for use in print through 2009, and Mr. Granger said he hopes to come up with new ideas for it. 'This is probably just a limited view of its use,' he said.

The electronic cover will be used in only 100,000 copies that go to newsstands — its overall circulation is about 720,000."

Read the full story at NYTimes.com.

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