Phone Dead? Forgot Your Book? Short Story Vending Machines Are Here To Save Your Commute

You’ve just arrived at the train station and a long commute looms. You pull out your phone to ease your boredom but a little red bar stares depressingly back at you. Sigh. Your battery is almost dead. You rummage around your bag for a book, a pamphlet, a receipt, dear god any morsel of entertainment to fill the ominous commute.

Nothing.

Faced with this very real and very important first world problem, a company in France has created the perfect antidote — a short story vending machine.

Here’s how it works.

The orange and black machine presents you with three buttons — one minute, three minutes or five minutes. You simply pick how long you want your short story to be and it’ll spit one out accordingly. On paper. For free.

Many stock up for a long commute.

Among the 5000 stories there’s everything from children’s tales to poetry to horror, all written and submitted by anonymous authors.

The vending machines are the brainchild of publishing house Short Edition who have hailed them a huge success. The idea was tentatively tested in Grenoble before exploding around France, with over thirty in the country alone, perched in train stations, cafes, libraries and museums. And they’ve had plenty of requests from other countries too.

But the stories aren’t just a cure for deprived iPhone addicts, the publisher hopes that commuters will choose to embrace the stories regardless of their phone batteries and encourage reading and writing in the process.

“Our ambition is to see distributors pop up everywhere to encourage reading — and writing — and to promote our artists. The paper medium is a breath of fresh air, it’s more unexpected than a smartphone screen,’ Short Edition director Christophe Sibieude told Télérama. The idea came to them in front of a vending machine full of chocolate bars and drinks.

“We said to ourselves that we could do the same thing with good quality popular literature to occupy these little unproductive moments,” Short Edition told news agency Agence France-Presse.

Now that MX is long dead, fingers crossed the short stories find their way to Australia sometime soon.

This story by Cameron Nicholls originally appeared on The Vocal.