Digital Magazines Take Steps Both Forward and Back
By Gail Nickel-Kailing on August 8th, 2008
At the Seybold Seminars Conference 1999 in San Francisco, I got my first glimpse of “e-paper” when John Seely Brown, then director of Xerox PARC, held up a dingy-looking piece of plastic. He said:
“Think of it as the world’s first truly erasable paper. You can print today’s news on yesterday’s paper. The paper recycles itself.”
Almost 10 years later, we’re rapidly approaching the day when that will happen. After all E Ink, the company that brought this technology to market, provides the core technology for Amazon’s Kindle, as well as a number of other devices.
As David Granger, Esquire Magazine’s editor in chief, put it in the New York Times, it appears the magazine industry is poised to take a giant leap forward. In a step to change a format that is 150+years old, Esquire will put a digital cover on a printed magazine. The October issue – 100,000 newsstand copies only – will have an electronic cover using technology from E Ink.
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Forward Steps:
Hearst Corporation, publisher of Esquire, has been trying to position itself as an environmentally friendly company and publishes a consumer site called The Daily Green. The site claims:
Hearst Corporation, the parent company of Hearst Magazines, has been at the forefront of raising awareness for and addressing environmental concerns. Among Hearst’s accomplishments on the environmental front:
- The company’s completion of Hearst Tower, the first gold LEED certified building in New York (honored by Global Green USA)
- Partnership with the State of California, California Rangeland Trust and American Land Conservancy in 2005 to form the largest conservation easement in history (82,000 acres) in San Simeon, CA
- Participation in philanthropic tree planning through National Arbor Day Foundation and New York Restoration Project
Hearst also participates in ReMix - Recycling Magazines is Excellent!, a national public education campaign aimed at increasing recycling of magazines and catalogs.
Backward Steps:
All well and good until you compare the “green” initiatives with the Real Cost of E-Ink, as calculated by Fast Company. Electronic paper is NOT as environmentally friendly as we would hope. The Times article tells us:
The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine’s distributor in Glazer, KY.
Fast Company writers and researchers calculated the greenhouse emissions for the cover – which is so expensive to produce it had to be sponsored by Ford’s SUV group. Here is the bad news:
The total outlay in greenhouse gas emissions for this little experiment – again, this is based on loose estimates – comes to 150 tons of CO2 equivalent, similar to the output of 15 Hummers or 20 average Americans for an entire year, and a 16% increase over the carbon footprint of a typical print publication. The potential environmental impact of the E Ink covers increases even more when you consider that the units are designed to be disposable after one use and they’ll make it more difficult or impossible to recycle the paper portion of the magazines.
Those calculations don’t take into consideration the environmental impact of disposing of all those plastic parts and batteries.
Putting on the Brakes:
While I’d love to see “today’s news on yesterday’s paper,” the environmental costs of making a version that will last only 90 days has slowed down my enthusiasm.
3 Responses to “Digital Magazines Take Steps Both Forward and Back”
By BoSacks on Aug 8, 2008 | Reply
Why Esquire Mag is your Future?
Your Bacckward steps missed the real point.
So many people are over-reacting to the announcement that Esquire is using e-ink on their cover that I almost don’t know where to begin. But almost isn’t don’t know.
First and foremost, this is a clever magazine cover gimmick for a 75th anniversary cover. Period, end of story, except for all the brouhaha.
They deserve to do something special. And e-ink is going to be something very special. In this case it is greatly underutilizing the power and the possibilities of e-ink, but what the heck? You have to start somewhere. And this year our industry starts here on the cover of Esquire with a flexible, magazine-bindable production of e-ink.
We as an industry have been inserting and on-serting for generations. Believe me I know, as I was partly responsible for the AOL onslaught of on-serting and inserting first fragile plastic diskettes and then CD’s into magazines. The computer and music sectors have been doing this for years. The women’s service groups have inserted hundreds of items including such nutty ideas as shampoo samples which in the course of palatalizing squished and squeezed the samples all over the printer’s bindery floor. So ease off on the condemnation that gimmicks are something new or distasteful.
And the same thing is true for the carbon footprint. Why is Esquire being singled out?
I’m the first to admit that we have been totally reckless as an industry when it comes to carbon foot-printing and inefficiencies, but to single out a single publisher… pure and absolute rubbish. Anyone who is starting to condemn a single gimmick in a single magazine doesn’t know the industry, the history, nor the true story of magazine sales and magazine production.
E-ink or e-paper is special, in fact it is very special, and it is an integral part of the future of the magazine business. If we are going to have a big future at all, it is going to be digital. We will combine the ease of use of digital editions of magazines with the portability of brilliantly colored WiFi connected epaper, with a drastically lower carbon footprint than today and dramatically reduced manufacturing costs. What’s not to like? What part don’t we understand?
Publishers sell words and thoughts, not paper and printing? For those who need to hear me say it again, printing ink on paper is not going to go away; it is also not going to be the dominant distribution vehicle of information. But digital delivery will be and e-ink will be king of that digital information delivery system.
BoSacks
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By Gail Nickel-Kailing on Aug 8, 2008 | Reply
Bo,
Your last line says it all. I have been waiting for nearly a decade for this technology to mature.
What I do object to is a publicity stunt (which this basically is) that creates 100,000 pieces of e-waste at a pretty high environmental cost to produce.
Let’s go back to what John Seely Brown said:
“Think of it as the world’s first truly erasable paper. You can print today’s news on yesterday’s paper. THE PAPER RECYCLES ITSELF (my emphasis).”
BTW – thanks for all those d***ed AOL diskettes and CD you sent me over the years! :-)
Gail
By Joseph Whiteman on Aug 8, 2008 | Reply
Personally, I am pumped about this decision by Esquire Magazine, not because of the magazine or the message but the impact it will have on the printing industry.
In the early days of the Internet craze many magazines tried to move to the internet but was haphazardly adopted by readers. Why? Just visit your closest waiting room. Often, it feels like a magazine store there, piles of magazines everywhere, most out dated.
Want to talk about “green”? Sure the initial outlay of this experiment will have impact, but my vision sees beyond that. This technology has the possibility to reduce the carbon foot print from thousands of delivery truck to the cost of pushing electrons down a wire. Sure the technology has a long way to go but I believe this will be huge.
Really, Who wants to walk around with a laptop open on transit, trying to click the mouse to get the next column. The e-books are getting close but, I know I will not fork out an initial 300 bucks to read magazines.
For this to succeed there needs to be a convergence of technologies: Printing medium, E-ink along with Phillips has that figured out. Power, this has a long way to go but thin film solar power looks very promising. Wireless transmission, pick your technology there are many. Computer controller, embedding micro controllers in things have been around for a while but can this technology step up to the task needed to do this work? Time will tell, Esquire will certainly see if this is durable enough. And Finally – Cost, keep the cost per unit to single digits and I’ll buy several.
I cannot finish without adding a final green note, waste management. Burning coal for electricity seemed benign in the beginning, little did they know. E-ink must consider the waste management part of the equation, the shelf life of the physical device factor into that.
My only fear at this time is the dancing leprechaun on the breakfast cereal box.