Though (unfairly) notorious for crime, the alpine town of Grenoble in France has got its shit together in at least one department: supplying its visitors and residents with short stories for free. The town recently installed eight tale-dispensing vending machines to give the easily bored an alternative to fiddling with their cell phones. 

The stories – 8cm wide and 60 cm long – are printed on paper chits, so they come out looking like the receipts supplied by automated gas station pumps. They’re curated for brevity with each machine having buttons for 1 minute, 3 minute, and 5 minute stories so people can tailor the length of their distraction. We assume that they’re also in French.

We’d love to see them installed in sites across Vancouver. Though still very much an anti-social crutch to help one ignore all human interaction while in public, the content would be less predictable than, say, Angry Birds. Indeed, from a content/story production angle, it would be thrilling to see what local writers could come up with.

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