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.
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 The New Yorker
(With inputs from The New Yorker)
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