The Vending Machine That Spits Out Short Stories
“Everything old is new again,” said Andrew Nurkin, the deputy director of enrichment and civic engagement at the Free Library of Philadelphia, which is one of the libraries
that got funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to install the dispensers.
We want to advance literacy among children and inspire creativity.”
Here’s how a dispenser works: It is shaped like a cylinder with three buttons on top indicating a “one minute,” “three minute” or “five minute” story.
Short Edition, a French community publisher of short-form literature, has installed more than 30 story dispensers in the United States in the past year to deliver fiction at the push of a button at restaurants
and universities, government offices and transportation hubs.
Scott Varner, executive director of strategic communications for Columbus City Schools in Ohio, said
his district will have a total of five kiosks, the first two of which were installed in December.
Last month public libraries in four cities — Philadelphia; Akron, Ohio; Wichita, Kan.;
and Columbia, S. C. — announced they would be installing them too.
Francis Ford Coppola, the film director and winemaker, liked the idea so much
that he invested in the company and placed a dispenser at his Cafe Zoetrope in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.
Leave it to the French, with their love of Voltaire
and Simone de Beauvoir, to revive literature in the era of hot takes, fast news and smartphone addiction.