e-media is here

And you thought that happened several years ago, with the advent of the Internet. I mean a different kind of e-media: call it old media's answer to hyperlinks, RSS feeds, and all that good stuff that its technological cousin has to offer.

If I can’t quite (yet) wrap my arms around the idea of an electronic book, I must say my first taste of e-ink magazine technology is not looking very good. Esquire’s much-hyped e-ink cover came out last week and the reviews are in. Wired hated it, and Engadget loved it.

Gizmodo, like a good geek Web site merely stuck to dissecting the electronics behind it and didn’t offer an opinion.

I walked into a Barnes & Noble to take a quick glance, but there was no way I was going to purchase the over-priced magazine for a whopping $5.99. What's worse, as Wired reports, this "special collector's edition" is not being made available to regular subscribers who themselves will have to buy it at the newsstand price as opposed to the 50c they would pay otherwise. Apparently the production costs were up to 10$ per cover. As Chris Snyder notes, that’s anything but smart business strategy.

The cover has a rectangular plate of electronic paper inserted with a blinking caption that proclaims, "the 21st Century Begins Now." In case you had any doubt, this is pretty much the best way to reinforce it. This Esquire gig was just eye candy though, something to get people to go gaga over and others to write about (and make 6 bucks apiece while they're at it). This is in no way the ultimate productive use of e-technology: a blurb on the cover is not a commercial for electronic paper, it's something the traditional paper can do just as well! If Esquire were to have done this right, they might have tried it alongside a story or added dimension to an illustration.

Let’s hope that the first e-newspaper will be less disappointing, which is very close, thanks to Plastic Logic, which has unveiled its electronic newspaper reader: a letter-size, sleek device, capable of reading formats ranging from PDF to Word and Powerpoint. An Electronics Show in Vegas early next year will announce which newspapers will use Plastic Logic’s services.

Now that sounds more promising – for the unwieldy reading experience that is the newspaper with its folding and re-folding, uneven columns, split sentences, story jumps, running heads, and low-quality paper, technology might actually offer some comfort.

A magazine, on the other hand, needs little help. It's pretty fabulous as is.