The American edition of Esquire magazine is to trial a digital front cover in September.

A specially developed screen and battery will be manually inserted into the front cover of 100,000 copies of Esquire flashing the headline 'Welcome to the 21st Century.'

The screen will also be used in the inside front cover to carry an advertisement for Ford, which is sponsoring the project.

"I hope it will be in the Smithsonian," said Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger in an interview with The New York Times.

"Magazines have basically looked the same for 150 years. I have been frustrated with the lack of forward movement in the magazine industry.

"The possibilities of print have just begun. In two years, I hope this looks like cellphones did in 1982, or car phones."

The screens are being put together by E Ink, which provides the same technology in Amazon's Kindle e-book. They will be built in China and shipped to Mexico where they will be built into the covers by hand.

The finished magazines will then be shipped to the distributor in specially refrigerated trucks to prolong the battery life. Granger estimates that the screens should work for 90 days.

The low-resolution black and white images will look fairly primitive but the magazine hopes to develop further models and has exclusive rights to the technology until the end of next year.

"This is really the 1.0 version," said Esquire publisher Kevin O'Malley. " Imagine when the consumer walks by a newsstand and sees that it is alive."