We maychuckle at John Cotton Dana's proposalin 1907 to use vending machines, justcoming into popular use for chewinggum and novelties, to display and circu-late books, but the concept behind themachine-that of the self-service li-brary-was and is a good idea. In hissuggestion that users insert their librarycard (or more precisely an encodedmetal strip "not larger than a Yale key")so borrower data could be recorded, wesee a distinctly modern application oftechnology to solve a library problem.
I've actually used a library vending machine that had books and DVDs in it in the last 2 years at a local pizza parlor.