Some people say that, in this digital age, the written word is dead, but the French have proven otherwise. In France, the publishing start-up shortEdition built the world’s first short-story vending machines. These “distributeurs d’histoires courtes,” or short-story dispensers, print out short stories on a thick strip of paper that resembles a supermarket receipt. The best part? It’s free of charge to the public. The prototypes first appeared in the mountaintop town of Grenoble in France. “In the first month, about ten thousand stories were printed,” writes Pauline Bock for the New Yorker. These free stories are now available all over France and places can host the dispensers for a fee of EUR 500 a month.

The Godfather trilogy’s Francis Ford Coppola liked them so much, he installed the very first one in his European-style cafe in San Francisco last May. “I love the idea of a dispensing machine that doesn’t dispense potato chips or beer or coffee or coca cola for money but gives you art,” Coppola said (watch, runtime 1:34). And who writes the stories, you ask? Well, shortEdition offers a free publishing platform, and so does Coppola’s online writing workshop, where editors review amateur writers’ submissions and add their top picks to the database for the masses to read.