E-paper makes its way to a newsstand near you. Precogs say, “I knew it would happen all along.”

First, it was a TV you could gather around in your living room.

Then it was a TV you could watch in colour.

Then it was a TV you could watch in big-screen glory.

Then it was a TV you could hang on your wall.

But how about a TV you can tape to your wall?

That’s just one of the infinite potential uses for E-Paper, a display technology that looks and acts like ordinary paper. E-paper’s been around for a while; it was first showcased back in 2000, and has been used here and there in various gadgets since. It has made its way into the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle, and in 2007 it was adopted by a Dutch company called Edupaper for the iLiad, a project wherein schoolkids’ heavy textbooks were replaced with an E-paper reader.

Needless to say, this is all very cool, but beyond the fact that these devices all share the same technology, there is one thing they have in common: they are handheld, cell-phone-like, plastic devices. The über-cool thing about E-paper is that it is, effectively, paper, and in theory, doesn’t need to be housed in a plastic shell to be active or effective. In a perfect world, one would roll up one’s E-paper as one would roll up a newspaper today and carry it with them, “Minority Report” style. However, all the wishful thinking in the world won’t contravene basic physics, and the paper still has to get its power and information from somewhere, obviously.

But practical uses for E-paper beyond little plastic gadgets is being drawn further and further out of the realm of science fiction and closer to the world of science fact, thanks to an announcement today by Esquire Magazine that they will be shipping their 75th anniversary edition with an E-Paper cover, with the words “The 21st Century Begins Now” blinking colourfully scrolling across the front.

Developed by E-Ink, the company credited with bringing the technology to market, the special cover will grace 100,000 of its 750,000 circulated issues. There’s no news on whether any of those special issues will make their way into Canada, but regardless, this can be seen as something of a leap forward in the world of printed media.

David Granger, Esquire’s Editor-In-Chief, certainly believes so, pontificating that the cover might hopefully “be in the Smithsonian”, and theorizing that in 2 years’ time, this particular cover will look “like cellphones did in 1982”. Additionally, the inside of the cover will feature a full-page ad for Ford’s ever-so-fancy new SUV, the Flex. Scoring such primo ad space certainly couldn’t have come cheap; this media is, after all, the first of its kind and bound to find a home on the bookshelves of advertising art directors, new media designers, and tech geeks the world over, not to mention have constant mention forever more as being “the first ever”, so the staying power of such an ad placement will almost certainly outweigh whatever the cost was to help offset Esquire’s 6-figure investment in the development of the technology, which was pretty extensive.

This is hardly the first time print publications have tried new technology in an effort to remain the hot medium of choice; those among us in our late 20s and beyond may well remember this fancy number from 1984; but regardless, it’s still exciting to see something leap off the screen and take one small step closer to a future-is-now-reality. The reality of E-paper is that it’s already being used all over the place, and you’ve likely seen it and not even known it on billboards or various other garish light-and-noise-makers designed to catch your attention. OLED has led a similar not-so-charmed kind of life. But with its incredibly tiny power consumption and its unique portability, E-Paper might just have all the right components to become the next media vehicle of choice for the 21st century. It certainly has the potential.