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B.C.’s first prose machine debuts at CapU

The stories are trapped inside. But with the push of a button you can set one of them free. That’s the appeal of the Short Story Dispenser, a literary vending machine installed at Capilano University’s Learning Commons Nov. 20.
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The stories are trapped inside. But with the push of a button you can set one of them free.

That’s the appeal of the Short Story Dispenser, a literary vending machine installed at Capilano University’s Learning Commons Nov. 20.

The first of its kind in British Columbia, the device offers students stories and poems free of charge any time of the day.

The fiction feed is an ideal way to feed: “the curiosity that we all have for story,” says CapU communications director Victoria Miles.

After first reading about community publisher Short Édition’s new invention in O, The Oprah Magazine, Miles says she knew she wanted to have fiction unfurling on campus.

“I just thought: That’s a match for Capilano University,” she says.

Students can select stories based on reading time with options for one-, three- and five-minute stories.

The one-minute story is popular, but “the brave and the bold choose three- and five-minute stories,”
Miles says.

The scroll is eco-friendly and appears similar to a grocery store receipt.

“The beauty of it is we don’t have the complications of changing a printer cartridge,” Miles says, explaining the dispensary uses a carbon printing process.

According to a New York Times report published this spring, the automated prose machine was selling for US$9,200.

Miles declined to divulge how much the university paid to buy the machine. However, she noted that importing the machine from France cost less than $14,000.

“It was a bargain at twice the price,” Miles says.

The school is also on the hook for a $250 monthly subscription fee.

“We’re honouring copyright and we’re honouring writing as professional work that is to be paid for,” she says.

The monthly fee provides royalty payments for a pool of 9,000 authors published by Short Édition.

The machines also offers poetry and classic short stories in the public domain.

“One visitor to the machine might receive a story written by a contributor to Story Édition . . . but the next person to press a button might get a classic poem by Emily Dickinson. That’s what I got last week,” Miles says.

It’s amazing 150-year-old poems can be, “some of the best content there is today,” Miles says.

Besides giving free fiction to the button-pushing public, the machine offers the university practical benefits, Miles explains.

“(It’s) a small leap, but a leap all the same into one more initiative that recognizes not only the literacy programs we teach but the potential of students and the way they write for the web.”

The machine encourages brevity, an essential skill for writers looking to find readers online. A web writer needs “a consciousness of a reader’s attention,” she says.

“The web is a noisy space,” she says. “If we can be concise and meaningful, then we can still get our message across in this space. ...  We’re not writing books here, we’re writing postcards.”

Besides offering what sponsor and filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola calls a “literary lift,” ownership of the machine may also lead to CapU students writing for Short Édition, Miles suggests.

Due to its low energy draw, the machine can stay on all the time.

“Once you’ve set it up it doesn’t require much attendance,” she says.

In its first week of operations the dispenser has rolled out 510 stories and poems, 58 per cent of the one-minute variety, according to CapU.

“People press the button and then they jump back because they don’t know what’s going to happen to them next,” Miles says. “It makes them curious.”

With relatively simple mechanization and a fairly sturdy design, Miles says the dispensary could keep on pumping out stories for years to come.

“If it functions well for us for two years it will more than have proven its value but we expect it to work a lot longer than that.”

The Grenoble, France-based company has sold the device to schools, libraries, grocery stores, and anywhere “lineups can be long and where people’s patience is tested,” Miles says.

CapU can affix their own “marketing messages” to the bottom of each story.

According to Short Édition, the company has more than 230,000 reader-subscribers since its founding in 2011.