I can assure you, this will not be what it looks like.

Hearst developing its own e-reader, for periodicals – CNET News — Apparently the company is not losing ENOUGH money with the SF Chronicle and the Seattle P-I, so it has decided to get into the miserable e-book business. Hopefully, for the sake of Hearst Co., this will just be a private label deal that will not affect the bottom line. Somehow, though, I suspect they will still lose money with this turkey.

Hearst, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, announced on Friday that it has developed an electronic reader for newspapers and magazines, the way Amazon.com’s new Kindle does for books.

The news, first reported by Fortune magazine, is really significant, as Hearst owns about 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, and has a strong influence on hundreds of magazines. Examples of those include the San Francisco Chronicle, Oprah Winfrey’s O, and Cosmopolitan.

It’s unclear if the device Hearst has been working on has anything to do with the eReader that Plastic Logic unveiled recently, but its principle seems the same. It’s a handheld device used to read digital content, much like the Kindle. The main difference would be that Hearst’s e-reader has a much larger size to accommodate the format of newspapers and magazines.

It’s also speculated that Hearst’s e-reader is going to be physically flexible and even foldable. The first version would come in black and white, with a later model coming in color and even with video playback capability.