We have customers who know exactly what they want and come at all hours to get it. It’s as if our stores were open 24 hours a day.

We want to put books in everyone’s hands.

We need to sell 10 books a day from every machine to make them profitable. Vending machines aren’t going to outshine traditional bookshops.

We knew that French bibliophiles would be horrified to see their books falling into a trough like candy or soda. So we installed a mechanical arm that grabs the book and delivers it safely.

Our biggest vending machine sellers are The Wok Cookbook and a French-English dictionary.

People have cravings for literature just as they do for bars of chocolate, fizzy drinks or all the other things you can now buy from machines. These vendors mean it’s as if our stores were...