A machine that dispenses literature
With the aim to inculcate the reading habit in children and adults alike, city-based social entrepreneur Aparna Vishwanatham and her team at Library Solutions have come up with Story Box, an ATM-like machine that dispenses literature.
Hyderabad: Passing through adults twice his height, a little boy makes his way to an orange-coloured machine. After tapping on the device’s touch screen a few times, he looks on as the machine dishes out a thin sheet of paper. He snips that sheet of paper and runs towards a quiet corner to read it.
Within minutes, he’s back for a do-over.
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With the aim to inculcate the reading habit in children and adults alike, city-based social entrepreneur Aparna Vishwanatham and her team at Library Solutions have come up with Story Box, an ATM-like machine that dispenses literature.
“In 2019, we wanted to import a similar story vending machine from France. But it proved to be quite expensive. In the pandemic, we had a lot of time and this is when we focused on devolving the product on our own,” says Aparna adding that Story Box is today placed in around 27 locations, most of which are schools. It is also placed at Ramakrishna Math, and Prof. Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University, in addition to being displayed at the Hyderabad Literary Festival recently.
At the press of a button, this machine prints out short stories, poems, facts, and puzzles. It has different levels of difficulty ranging from easy to very high. The content is curated according to the purchaser’s needs by their editorial team who are also responsible for remotely adding more content to the devices, at a subscription price.
Aparna says that when reading a book may be intimidating for some, the Story Box works as an anchor and even as a substitute for traditional libraries.
“Reading has a lot of benefits and Story Box creates a new channel altogether. We want to get readers to sit down for just fifteen minutes and be able to enjoy that experience of reading without distraction,” she adds.
The team plans to increase the number of machines in the future and work on creating content in other Indian languages to reach more readers.
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