Short Stories a Touch Away: Welcome These French Vending Machines!

Stories are printed out on thin recycled paper that looks exactly like a grocery shopping bill.

Currently there are eight such distributors in a small city of France. (Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@stephfaris)

This is one of the best innovations an avid reader could come across in Grenoble, France. You press a button and you get a short story out of a vending machine for free. A publishing start-up, Short Edition, launched it last October in the city’s tourism offices, libraries and social centres.

The big orange terminals have three options of 1, 3 or 5 minutes that refer to how many minutes a story will take to read.

Stories are printed out on thin recycled paper, which looks exactly like a shopping bill and can be easily be folded and put in a pocket or a wallet. Currently there are eight distributors in this small city of France.

(Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@takeeZZ )

This idea surely gives a break from the non-stop reading from the smartphones, and so believes the co-founder of Short Edition.

The written word isn’t dead. These machines offer something that the text-providing gadgets in our pockets do not. Smartphones have blurred the limits between our professional life and our distractions. The paper format provides a break from omnipresent screens. People may not have reacted so strongly to our vending machines six years ago, when smartphones hadn’t become essential to our lives yet.

Christophe Sibieude, Co-founder and Head of Short Edition told <i>The New Yorker</i>

(With inputs from The New Yorker)