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The World's First Short-Story Vending Machine
Topic Started: Jan 24 2016, 03:14 AM (28 Views)
Webster
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Wasatch Storyteller & Resident Forum Curmudgeon
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The New Yorker: How A City In France Got The World's First Short-Story Vending Machine

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When Jess Mateychuk entered the tourism office in Grenoble, France, he wasn’t looking for information about the city. “I finally found them!” the twenty-one-year-old exchange student from Winnipeg, Canada, said with excitement. He was referring to the city’s recent cultural innovation turned Internet hit: a black and orange, rocket-looking cylinder that spits out short stories, free of charge.

Under a glass panel labelled “Distributeur d’histoires courtes” (“Short-story distributor”), he found three numbered buttons: one, three, and five. The numbers refer to how many minutes a story will take to read. Jess chose three. The button flickered and a long ticket—a bit like a supermarket receipt, but on thicker paper—slipped out. “Chambre avec vue, by Blandine Butelle,” the top of the sheet announced. It was a fictional dialog between two pensioners. (“I’m telling you he’s not snoring anymore!” “Come on, Jacqueline, that doesn’t mean he’s dead!” it begins.) Mateychuk printed more stories, “for later,” as William Haettel, an employee in the tourism office, looked on. “Improbable things have happened since we got these,” he said. “Italian tourists have taken selfies with them. They work incredibly well, and it’s not even peak season.” Ten minutes later, the machine was out of paper.


There are currently eight short-story distributors in Grenoble, a city of a hundred and sixty thousand in the French Alps. Last October, the local publishing startup Short Edition launched the prototypes at city hall, the tourism office, and in libraries and social centers. Those who wish to host the machines can rent them from the company, for five hundred euros a month, but Grenoble got their machines at a discount: funds from the city council and the regional government helped to fund the development of the prototype. Locals queuing to return a book or to meet with a councilor are now invited to print and read one of the six hundred original stories provided by the machines. In the first month, about ten thousand stories were printed.

“The written word isn’t dead,” Christophe Sibieude, the co-founder and head of Short Edition, said, as he put on glasses tinged with fluorescent blue and green and looked down at his smartphone. Sibieude believes that 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,” he said. “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 all parts of our lives yet.”

-Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-a-city-in-france-got-the-worlds-first-short-story-vending-machines?mbid=rss
....interesting....thoughts?
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