Also Plants Fly: Never Judge a Book by Its Cover

They say not to judge a book by its cover, and the manufactures of the book vending machine in the pictures above took this advice literally. Book vending machines are very popular in Korean subway and train station (this one in particular is in the subways station of Wolpyeong, Daejeon), as they provide probably the last chance to get a cheap book just before a potentially long journey.

Differently from other machines though, this particular one has motors that are moved at fixed intervals of time in order to turn the first page and give to the customers the chance to pick inside the book. Looking inside a book before buying it is a common practice for customers in a bookstore and has also been widely used by online retailers, who created a virtual metaphor for "looking inside a book" by browsing a pdf file (Amazon's Look Inside feature is probably the best example).

Since customers usually want to peek inside a book before buying it, it is natural that also the manufactures of this vending machine tried to mimic this action. My question though is why they preferred to create a physical interface actuated by motors to turn the pages, rather than relying on a LCD screen, with a software that virtually allow people to see some content of the book.

One simple explanation is that perhaps this approach would be too expansive, or that this company doesn't have enough know-how to deal with custom software and external LCD screens. Another explanation is that the physical book is able to convey information that a virtual representation cannot transmit, and since the product sold in this case is a physical and not virtual object, customers might be as well interested in the physical qualities of the object and not only in the written content (the quality of paper, for instance, is an important aspect that affect the pleasure to read).

We are basically facing again the physical VS virtual representation of objects, as we have seen it many times in this blog. My 2 cents on this matter is that the physical representation is dominant and unavoidable. Even when you read an ebook, which apparently is not physical at all, the physical properties remain dominant, but this time they shift from the book, to the particular device you use as reader (the feeling of reading a book on the iPad vs a Kindle).