Book Vending Machine

In most of Korean train station you can find, among others, a particular kind of vending machine: a book vending machine. The working principle is exactly the same you are used to with soft drinks vending machines: insert the money or card, select the book you want to purchase, get it from the bottom as it is delivered like a can.

What I find interesting about this machine, is not its purpose or working mechanisms (after all, it is a simple vending machine), but the principles behind the selection of the books. Let me explain myself.

Consider a vending machine that sells soft drinks: from the vendor's perspective, it is very important to select the right beverages that maximize the consumption, namely, among the most common and familiar beverages, select those that cover the wider range of tastes. So, you will almost always find things like Coke, Sprite, Fanta in the U.S., while for example in Korea you will find Pepsi, tea, orange juice and coffee (in most cases, tastes are culturally dependent).

So, here the question? How those books are chosen? The question is not trivial.
If they sell only best-sellers, the probability that somebody already purchased the same book is very high, unless the target users of these machines are casual readers. In that case perhaps, the cover is more important. Other issues are that the books cannot be browsed, you cannot read any excerpt, and the the book market, differenlty from soft drinks, continuously and rapidly changes.

I bet that these are just few of the numerous problems related with the seltion of the books: it will be worthy some further investigation.