I’ve been seriously waiting to switch all of my mag subscriptions from dead trees and glue to glass and bits, and it looks like it’s happening – major mag publisher Hearst is jumping on the iPad subscription train with Esquire, Popular Mechanics and O (the Oprah magazine) in July, at $US2 a month each. More »
Men’s magazine and fashion fixture Esquire is the newest glossy on the block to give itself an iPad makeover. As has been the case with other mag-to-tablet conversions, interactivity is being pressed: inline footnotes, movable photos and added video content. More »
Needless to say, Esquire’s recent e-ink cover stunt left most people a little disappointed when it hit newsstands. Enthusiasm grew a bit after word leaked out that Esquire expected people to hack the cover, but analysis of the dissected display revealed that there wasn’t much opportunity for meaningful customisation outside of changing the timing for each section’s blinking. Yeah, that’s not all that exciting, but the folks at Hack-a-Day managed to make an interesting (but not super functional) e-paper clock this way—and you can too using their handy instructions. [Hack-a-Day]
When the much-hyped Esquire E-Ink cover finally shipped to newsstands a few weeks ago, we were kind of underwhelmed. Using conventional methods, the sectioned panel isn’t really hackable in any meaningful way, so Phone Losers took a more proactive approach: violence.
Though it’s no huge shock to find out what’s behind Esquire’s recent E-Ink cover, it’s always fun to look at the postmortem pics. Phil over at MAKE took the magazine cover apart, and in addition to the E-Ink display, found lithium cells, printed circuit boards, and flash-programmable microcontrollers, which could be partially hacked or reprogrammed.
Esquire’s E-Ink cover may either seem like a poor idea to you, or a taster of the way things may go in the future: whichever camp you sit in, you can check it out now as it’s hit the newsstands. Over at TheDastardlyReport they’ve got hold of one, and show its subtle-contrasted goodness in this video. Check out that blinking! It’s awesome vaguely disappointing… or am I the only one to think so? Now, if it were a proper dot-matrix affair then I’d be tempted to buy the mag, assuming I could find one of the limited-edition copies. But that’s just me, and YMMV. Over to you in the comments. [The Dastardly Report]
I was not impressed with Esquire’s E-ink cover idea, but Joel Johnson at BBG has interviewed the Esky overlords and changed my mind a bit. Surprisingly, Esquire expects us to buy these mags and hack them. Second, Ford advertisements, also in E-ink, displaced some of the cost of production. That’s good news for us. I still think its wasteful when they could do the same thing through Amazon or Sony’s e-books for far less, but this interview goes a long way towards convincing me to buy one when they hit stands. A lot more at [BBG.]
