With the quickening pace of modern society, many Chinese people find it hard to set aside time to read a book. The increasing availability of online novels, especially formatted for mobile phones, is seeing readers turn to their small screens instead.

People reading on mobile phone screens. [Global Times]

"I can read any time, any where with my cell phone," said Guo Shuaiyu, a 20-year-old college student. "I see many classmates reading novels on their phones while eating in the canteen."

Popular online-literature website, Hongxiu.com, has more than 1.9 million titles on its wap site, which can be accessed by mobile internet users.

Readers can either download an entire novel for around 2 yuan (US$0.29), or read a serialized story on the wap site for 0.03 yuan to 0.04 yuan (US$0.005) every 1,000 characters.

"Mobile phone screens are becoming bigger, functions are being improved and the price of accessing mobile internet is going down, so more and more people are reading on their mobile phone screens," explained Fan Xiaoxia, public relations officer at Hongxiu.

"You could not have imagined reading a novel on the tiny screen of your phone 10 years ago," she added.

The increase in popularity of the reading form has also given rise to mobile phone novels. Due to their length, actual books and web novels are not necessarily suitable for mobile phones, shorter more mobile phone friendly works are now in demand.

"Mobile phone novels are like American TV series, while web novels are like Korean TV series," explained Qi Xiaoshi, president of Shengda Literature Wireless, a internet literature company.