NANJING, May 28 (Xinhua) -- Authorities of east China's Jiangsu Province said over 16,500 reading rooms have been set up in the countryside of Jiangsu.

The province has invested nearly 300 million yuan (43 million U. S. dollars) to build countryside reading rooms. Some 32 million books, 1.5 million copies of newspapers and magazines, and over 13,000 computers and big screens have been distributed to these reading rooms.

Jiao Jianjun, deputy head of the publicity department of Jiangsu, said the reading rooms have provided farmers with more accesses to reading resources, and the reading rate of the province's rural area was raised from the previous 45 percent to the current 82.2 percent.

The province plans to further improve the reading rooms, by measures such as equipping them with more quality books and more digital devices.

The farmers' reading room project was first piloted in the country's western regions of Gansu and Guizhou in 2005, and was expanded on a national scale starting in 2007.