Shoulder to shoulder with strangers on a swaying subway car, Li Zining plugs in her earbuds, and as the narrator of the sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem begins, the clang of doors and hum of conversation fade, leaving her adrift in a quiet, otherworldly realm of her own.

Across China, millions of Generation Z readers are seeking the same hush, their glowing screens now serving as the new parchment. "Just got into sci-fi, so I started with the classics," Li said, noting that whether cooking or running, she's always got an audiobook playing, and before she knew it, she'd plowed through several hefty sci-fi titles.

China's digital natives born between 1995 and 2009, also known as "Generation Z", have rewritten the rules of how stories are discovered, consumed and shared.

Making up nearly one-fifth of the country's total population, they are more likely to download e-books onto their phones and tablets than to visit bookstores or libraries for physical copies. They consume vast amounts of online literature, share reviews and annotations on social media platforms, follow "book bloggers", and seek out "reading buddies".

Data from WeChat Reading shows that 6.56 million, or 46 percent, of its monthly active users belong to Gen Z. On Zhangyue, the iReader Technology platform, about one-third of monthly active users are Gen Zers, who spend an average of 120 minutes per day on the platform.

Chen Wenting, who holds an annual subscription to a reading app, believes that e-reading allows for "reading whenever and wherever you want" and is relatively cost-effective.

A survey by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication shows that last year, 38.5 percent of adult citizens engaged in reading through audiobooks.

For the youngsters, books are not only read but also experienced through others' interpretations.

Cheng Nan, a college student, has recently become engrossed in watching explanatory videos of the Nobel Prize-winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude on the video-sharing platform Bilibili. "I found it hard to muster the courage to read such a classic, but the explanatory videos were quite engaging," she said.

These videos not only cover the plot but also provide background and extended insights, often accompanied by animations or clips from TV adaptations, making them very appealing, Cheng added.

When a content creator drops a video clip on social media with illustrations about the Chinese novel White Deer Plain, the view counter races past 20 million more quickly than most first printings sell out.

In 2024, the number of reading videos longer than five minutes on the Douyin platform increased by 336 percent year on year, with a 137 percent increase in their views. Meanwhile, book review videos and images saw a 135 percent increase in views and a 518 percent jump in cumulative shares.

Some Gen Z readers also enjoy finding like-minded "reading buddies". According to Xiao Xia, a college student, reading with a "buddy" not only helps keep schedules on track and encourages timely completion of books, but also offers fresh perspectives and knowledge, uncovering blind spots in one's thinking.

On the WeChat Reading platform, users can interact with others by highlighting and commenting on specific sentences. "You can record your thoughts when reading a book or a particular sentence. When you don't understand something in the book, you can see what others think and sometimes have an epiphany," Chen Wenting said.

Reading weighty volumes becomes more interesting when you can read along with comments from other readers, Chen added.

Traditional publishers are now chasing the digital glow, using big data to target readers and livestreaming to launch new titles. "We are in a critical period of redefining product forms and industry rules," said Huang Zhijian, chairman of the China Publishing Group. "The core of the publishing industry is knowledge sharing, which should not be limited to physical books."

Cong Ting, a professor at the School of Publishing, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, said, "The publishing sector must actively use new technologies to make quality content more accessible and perceptible to the young population."

Xinhua