E-ink, that Esquire cover, and the future

First, notice the grayness of the E-Ink's output, at the right.   I ran across older articles on an interesting use of e-ink -- Esquire's Oct.'08 75th Anniversary issue used an e-ink cover, for which a special small battery was designed (6-figure investment) to fit inside the cover and run for 90 days, until after the magazine was sold.

  Make Magazine has some good photos and details (including links to high resolution photos) of the physical elements that went into that cover, including chips and 2  e-ink screens.

  Here's a video of that cover (click on "HD" at bottom-right of video for a better look -- a big investment for a small effect!, but definitely different and the jaded crowd commenting on Gizmodo and Flickr were impressed.  Esquire challenged the engineering-inclined to hack the cover.
There's also a video of it on newstands, blinking away :-)  Now I remember seeing it and wondering, briefly, what on earth that was.

Esquire has a page mapping out how this was all put together, distribution-wise, across the world, starting from its being, yes, "Made in China."

Why the cover?   Esquire explains: "...we created the special cover to demonstrate a revolutionary technology that will change the way we all read paper magazines in the years ahead."   The idea for the cover started 7 years ago when Esquire visited E Ink, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose managing partner, the Nicobar Group, is in Shanghai.

The beginnings: as described in a piece written in 2002 and titled "The Next Gutenberg."   Joseph Jacobson (MIT), a founder of E Ink, called the new 'paper'  "Radio Paper" and the Esquire writer points out, "Because the type on the page is not pixels but, essentially, ink -- tiny chips of pigment on a layer of circuitry -- E Ink promises the best of both worlds: the visual appeal of ink on paper and the renewability of a computer screen"

Some of us have wondered how e-ink technology works.



  In addition to information on the linked page above, here's a video of the e-Ink process by the Museum of Science, Boston.  The movie requires Real Player.   How Stuff Works also has an article on how electronic ink works, and Jason Slater Technologies has a brief and less-technical article on it.

Even in a new Kindle world, there are competing technologies already challenging e-ink right now, and I'll probably include some of that too.