Midway through a west coast red eye last week, I was sleepily browsing through an airport bookstore when I saw something flashing up at me from the stacks.  Was that my imagination or was that magazine blinking?  Indeed it was.

The October edition of Esquire looked like a miniature Times Square billboard, its sleek black cover eclipsed by a flashing message (and a cheeky one at that): “The 21^st Century Begins Now.”  In celebration of its 75^th anniversary, Esquire claims to be the first magazine cover to be printed with electronic ink (also known as “e ink”).

Even if you missed this edition of Esquire, you’ve likely seen eink in action before. It’s used in electronic displays, including in the top ebooks on the market, Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony’s Reader. However, this is reportedly the first time the digital technology has been incorporated into a print page.  Esquire explains the arduous, innovative (and somewhat chilly) path its creation: first, EInk Corporation (creator of the technology) had to design circuitry thin and flexible enough to bend with the cover, as well as small enough to draw a level of energy that would allow the battery to last at least 90 days. The display, electronics and batteries were assembled in Shanghai, then shipped to Mexico (via refrigerated trucks) where each unit was embedded by hand.

How does it work? Our friends at Wikipedia say: the principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair…each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader.

This makes the surface appear white at that spot.

At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot. 

The long road to the future

So, what’s the future of eink?  While it’s been heralded as a “game changing” technology for nearly a decade, it’s just now coming into its own - a tad longer lead time than its inventors (and its investors) anticipated. But like most game changers, the road between getting in the game and actually changing it is often paved with hype.

E Ink cofounder Joseph Jacobson, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, was working on the discovery which led to the development of eink technology in 1997.  The company launched that year with $100 million in funding and predictions of an $80 billion market opportunity. Three years later the first working prototype of electronic paper was unveiled. While it got rave reviews, what it didn’t get were a lot of customers. According to this Forbes article, by 2003 E Ink was out of money, having run through its initial funding without delivering a product to market. But the company was resurrected the following year when the CEO was replaced and it nailed a contract to provide the displays for Sony’s ebook Reader. In 2007 it landed the Amazon Kindle contract. Last year reportedly more than half of the company’s $15 million in revenue came from companies that sell ebook gadgets.

The vision of E Ink isthe next-gen RadioPaper, a lightweight, flexible display similar to organic paper that could be used to create an electronic book or newspaper “with real pages that can be leafed through, thumbed over and read on the beach.” Ultimately electronic ink could transform almost any surface to into a dynamic display: clothing, buildings, everyday objects, turning the whole world into an information (or perhaps advertising?) mecca.