Now You Can Get Short Stories from a Vending Machine

In the town of Grenoble, France, they’ve installed new vending machines that print short stories. Instead of snacks, you can get stories printed out that take 1, 3 or 5 minutes to read. The stories are free and conveniently print on thin receipt paper, making them easy to discard or store.

Christophe Sibieude and Quentin Peple founded the project together. Sibieude created the start up Short Édition, whose app has 140 000 subscribers. The subscribers upload their fiction, poetry and experimental writing to the app, and these writings are then distributed through the vending machines.

Sibieude said the idea came to him as he was standing in front of a vending machine selling chocolate bars and candy: “We said to ourselves that we could do the same thing with good quality popular literature to occupy these little unproductive moments.”

The project has even got the mayor of Grenoble, Eric Piolle, on board, who said: “We are trying to re-imagine the city center as a place of shared experiences. We are trying to launch a revolution, and the objective is to build a wider and calmer downtown area.”

At the moment the machines can only be found in Grenoble, but the hope is that Short Édition will be shipping the machines anywhere they’re wanted as soon as they’ve worked out their costs. Peple said they have already gotten requests from “all over,” so hopefully we can all fight boredom with fiction very soon.