Cake, Coffee, and Common Reading

Cover of the 2018 common reading "$2.00 a Day"

Join the Libraries for cake and coffee—and our Common Reading Bot.

At “Coffee, Cake, and Common Reading” on Tuesday, Sept. 25 from 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in the Fishbowl Forum at D. H. Hill Jr. Library, the Libraries’ very literary robot gives you a printout of a key quotation from the 2018 NC State Common Reading selection $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer—and it reads that quotation aloud to you!

The event offers a new way to engage with and discuss this provocative book about poverty, hunger, and homelessness in America.

With the support of a Common Reading Mini-Grant, Libraries Fellow Colin Nickels helped develop and launch the bot last year. Nickels took the existing Poem Dispenser bot that Digital Research and Scholarship Librarian Markus Wust developed in the NCSU Libraries Makerspace that printed out poems for the Libraries’ National Poetry Month events. It combined a Raspberry Pi 3, a thermal printer, and a small touch screen. Then, Nickels added an audio component. The Common Reading Bot prints out a quote from the book and then reads it to you in the voices of Libraries Fellows and students in the Digital Media Lab.

Last year’s version went to multiple Common Reading events across campus, loaded with sixteen quotes from the 2017 selection Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This year’s version has been expanded, with thirty quotes from $2.00 a Day.

For Nickels, the bot isn’t just a fun way to promote the Common Reading selection. When people interact with it an an event, it creates an opportunity for deeper engagement with the book, too.

“Last year, we asked, ‘How do you get people to engage with it?’ We kind of honed our pitch,” Nickels says. “You start with ‘Are you familiar with the Common reading program? Have you read the book? What were the issues that stood out to you? How about you press this button and get a quote and we can talk about it?’ And because it takes a little bit of time to print a quote, it gives you the chance to have a little bit of a conversation about the book with the person who’s getting the quote.”