I love this, and just had to share it! Thanks for the article, Matt Grant! https://lithub.com/frances-beloved-short-story-dispensers-are-coming-to-america/
In
Francis Ford Coppola’s Café Zoetrope in San Francisco, an odd machine stands in
the middle of one of the dining rooms. It’s a tall black-and-orange cone with a
lighted monolith sticking out of its top. The kiosk, built by the French
publishing company Short Edition, is called a Short Story Dispenser. It’s the
first of its kind in the United States. With just the push of a button, the
dispenser prints a one, three, or five minute story, completely free of charge.
The stories come out on long rolls of paper like a receipt.
Lydia
Valledor, Café Zoetrope’s General Manager, says the dispenser has been a huge
hit since it was installed a year and a half ago. “I love the idea, especially
for us,” she says. “We are all about Art; we have a lot of art on our walls. We
also have Mr. Coppola‘s magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, which is a short story
magazine. So the dispensers are very related to our place.” Valledor add that
the dispenser comes in handy since the café tries to encourage patrons to stay
off their phones and digital devices. “When people ask if we have Wi-Fi for the
kids, we point to the machines and say, ‘No, but you have a story you can
read.’”
The
dispensers first started popping up in Short Edition’s hometown, the French
city of Grenoble, in October 2016. “We always believed in the power of short
literature, and the fact that it is particularly adapted to the modern world,
as a way to bring (or bring back) people to reading,” says Loic Giraut, and
international business developer for the company. According to Giraut, The
dispensers were born after a seemingly routine have it ended in a flash of
inspiration. “One day, while they were in front of the coffee vending machine,
the four cofounders of Short Edition thought: ‘Why couldn’t we do the same
thing, but with culture stories instead of coffee? Literature should be
available everywhere!’” The company build a prototype and showed it to
Grenoble’s mayor Eric Piolle, who commissioned eight machines to be erected
around the city.
The
dispensers are extremely simple to operate. “When plugged in, the machine
connects to the GSM network, which allows us to manage and adapt the content,”
says Giraut. For example, during December, the dispensers only put out
Christmas or holiday-themed stories. Writers are discovered through Short
Edition’s expansive online community of 100,000 short stories by 9000 authors.
An even larger community of readers – some 200,000 – vote on their favorite
stories.
“We
always work with the community… to identify the best texts,” says Giraut.
“Anybody can create an account on short-edition.com, take part in a writing
competition that we organize, and publish his or her text.” Submitted stories
are eligible for one of two prices. The public winner receives the most votes.
The Short Edition editorial board and a jury of readers select the winner. “All
the texts that have sufficient quality are then included in the dispenser
worldwide,” Giraut says.
Reaction
to the dispensers has been overwhelmingly positive so far. “We are receiving
tons of messages both by email and social media, of people just saying thank
you, or telling us that the story they read has made their day,” Giraut says.
“We often hear people saying they had the feeling that story they picked up
randomly was made for them, that it was really related to their actual life. It
makes us really proud, because this was our goal when we invented the
dispenser: to create emotion.”
Today,
there are more than 150 short story dispensaries worldwide, most of which are
in France. But there are 20 machines in North America, and that number is about
to grow. “Our objective is to pursue our development in North America by
installing more and more dispensers and starting to gather content from North
American authors by launching writing contest in the U.S.,” Giraut says. “We
have a lot going on in the beginning of 2018, and new machines should very soon
appear on both west and east coasts.”
Sure
enough, on March 22, at the 2018 Public Library Association‘s conference, Short
Edition announced that they are installing four more machines on U.S. soil.
This time, they will benefit public libraries: the Akron-Summit County (Ohio) Public
Library, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Richland Library in Columbia
South Carolina, and the Wichita Public Library in Kansas. Each dispenser will
be specifically branded to the library. And that’s not all Short Edition has
planned. They hope to eventually include translations, allowing author is to be
read internationally as well. “At some point, our objective is also to have a
worldwide community of writers and readers, and have some Asian authors read in
Europe or America, American authors read in Africa or South America, etc.,”
says Giraut.
For
now, Valledor says the one dispenser in San Francisco has become so popular
that people come in off the street just to print out a story. While in most
establishments it might be considered rude to do such a thing without being a
paying customer, Valledor encourages it. She says it helps the café find new
customers, all through the power of literature. “It’s like I always say,
they’re coming today for a story – people who have never been here before –
they open the door, see the space, they love it, they come back.”
Until next month,
Leigh
www.leighcourt.com
