Esquire magazine plans to give its readers both the written – and the digital – word in its October issue, which will feature so-called electronic ink. E Ink, the maker of Amazon's popular e-book called Kindle, is providing the technology – paper-like display cells that will allow black-and-white words and images to crawl news-ticker-style across the cover. A tiny battery will power the display for about 90 days before it runs out of juice. (The issue will also include a fold-out ad on the back cover using electronic ink.) Only 100,000 issues of the mag (circulation: 720,000) will feature the snazzy technology; these coveted few will be delivered via refrigerated vehicles designed to preserve the batteries. Esquire editor David Granger told the New York Times that he wants to shake up the world of magazines, which have looked basically the same for the past 150 years. He hopes that in several years the budding technology will have advanced enough that this first attempt will look like “cell phones did in 1982.”
