Books at any hour

I love this idea that the Parisians have come up - it's a "Livre à toute heure" or a book-at-any-hour machine. Five of the have been installed in various locations across Paris, and they contain a selection of 25 books from Homer's Odyssey and Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland, to 100 Delicious Couscous Recipes and The Wok Cookbook, the latter, together with a French-English dictionary, is apparently a top seller, and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal is also popular. (I confess my mind is boggling at the thought of 100 recipes features CousCous - but that's another story !). All the books sell for just 2 Euros (about £1.35 or $2.45)

The first thing I thought of, when I read this story, was Jasper Fforde and his "Will Speak" machines (an animatronic bust of William Shakespeare that recites a famous portion of a play, such as Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' speech)... Apparently these book vending machines also exist in the US, but the Parisian ones have one major advantage over the American ones - the former don't drop the book into a slot, they deploy a mechanical arm that offers the book to the purchaser, which seems far less philistine somehow...