A vending machine launched in Hyderabad that dispenses stories, facts, puzzles, and fables is ready to create its debut at the (HLF) Hyderabad Literary Festival at Vidyaranya High School from January 27 to 29, 2023.

Titled Story Box, this four-foot tall cherry orange machine developed from metal is customised to print free information on HLF’s multiple activities across 13 streams and short, curated literary content.

“Students call it an ATM machine of literature,” says Aparna Vishwanatham, seated next to a Story Box at DoScience, an experiential Science centre in Sanjeevaiah Park.

The idea of Story Box budded in December 2019 when the team considered developing and setting up France’s Story Machine- a story-vending machine at DoScience.

The team operated through an iterative procedure to create Story Box.

The two years of the covid-19 pandemic provided them time to create a technical team (coding, hardware, and design) and link with vendors to manufacture it in Hyderabad. With five editorial members, including Aparna, the first machine was tested at Vidyaranya High School in February 2021.

The team started to connect with schools in May 2022. Currently, 29 units of Story Box are present at schools such as Sanghamitra, Colonel’s, Venus, and Mumtaz.

Aparna stated that Ramakrishna Math is going with our regular content as they want students of languages to inculcate the reading habit, while the Agricultural University wants their students to read up on the latest developments in the area of agriculture. We develop content from their books, agriculture-focused websites, diverse platforms, and technologies.

Language & theme complexities are a few parameters to classify the content determined by the difficulty level and not reading time. It is not age but our ability to read that clarifies our reading levels, says Aparna.

The team creates the source of the content from published books, already out of copyright. “We have internal procedures to ensure that we do not use anything that is presently under copyright without explicit authorization from the copyright owner, Aparna adds.

A click on a story or poem in the menu will offer users a choice from various levels-

• Very easy (5 to 7 years)


• Easy (7 to 10 years)


• Medium (12 years+)


• High (13 years+)


• Very high (16 years+).

The idea of keeping the content short is to draw a broader readership.

Won’t these strips of the paper produce paper waste? “We like the children to read and not on a digital screen. In India, with enormous economic disparities, technological gadgets are not available to all, and reading on paper is much more suitable for comprehension than a digital screen.

”While paper with some content is recycled, the important ones can be distributed among friends and family members.”

Aparna reports that 70,000 paper strips have been printed till now across their story boxes. “We are one step towards motivating people to indulge in five minutes of focused reading across all age groups.”

Priced at Rs. 70,000, the Story Box is available across Hyderabad and can be easily dispatched to other cities as well on request.