Online books have spawned a few good writers and paved the way for the migration to digital media. But beneath the democratic smiley face lies the price that both creators and consumers have to pay.

Shortly before midnight on June 16, Sollong updated his online novel, adding a new chapter. A few hours later he was dead. His friends say he worked himself to death.

Sollong, whose Chinese handle means Snowfall for Ten Years, was a professional scribe who worked exclusively on web fiction. Only the management at Qidian.com, where he was a contracted writer, knows his real name and even they need to consult a database to find it. You see, Qidian claims to have 1.6 million contracted novelists, which translates to a huge army of mostly youngsters hunched over computers and churning out mountains of words for quick consumption.

Sollong was toiling on his latest novel, titled Wu Over the World (Wubutianxia), a martial arts fantasy that has unveiled 1.6 million Chinese words, garnered 1.4 million clicks and been recommended 44,000 times. He was lured into the vocation by the dream of making it big, with literature websites like Qidian constantly touting success stories. But for each one who rakes in a million yuan in annual revenue, there may be hundreds of thousands of others who cannot make ends meet. Sollong was not among the highest paid and he had to work non-stop to pay his rent.