A vending machine in Washington, D.C., is providing nourishment — for the mind. LitBox is filled with books by local authors, just steps from the White House, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Lauren Woods launched the project in May after growing frustrated with what she saw as some publishers' focus on sensationalism and the lack of bookstores focused on local authors in the area. "I had friends who wrote award-winning books and couldn't get their books into D.C. bookstores because they were smaller presses, or they didn't have a mass appeal, or the book buyer didn't think they would be profitable," Woods said. "And that always seemed wrong to me."

Inspired by a European book vending machine, she set about planting one in the nation's capital to try to market books more equitably and see how they sell. The hypercompetitive publishing industry makes it challenging for some books to get into stores, and Woods wants those she still finds excellent to get to readers. "Although those bigger books are going to be marketed differently, when they are marketed equally, they sell pretty equally," Woods said.

Her experiment seems to have worked out so far. People are buying from the vending machine almost as many smaller press books as those from the "Big Five" publishers — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster.