The city of Taicang in Jiangsu province is constructing five 24-hour self-service libraries around areas with large passenger volume, including the museum, residential areas, shopping plazas, hotels and agricultural markets.

They are scheduled to be put into service early next year. Each library will be equipped with 402 books, which will be regularly added, changed and replaced according to the book-borrowing situation.

Readers can borrow and return books by themselves with a swipe of a card. They can also return the books borrowed from the city library to a self-service library. Lu Weidong, one of the Taicang residents, praised the library for its convenience.

In the future, the self-service libraries will allow readers to borrow and return books with their resident cards, and the function of scanning QR codes to download e-books will be available as well.