Where would you make money if you just handed over your phone to read a book?
Singapore is trying something new to encourage people to read and not scroll through social media feeds. It provides little monetary rewards and gamification as well as fun to encourage people to build a regular reading habit.
At a moment of increasing concern over screen usage and doomscrolling, Singapore takes a different approach: It is making reading more pleasurable than telling people to shut their phone off.
With the programme we can earn virtual coins by doing a daily reading session of at least 15 minutes. The rewards are small, but we want this to be about consistency rather than money-making.
What is Singapore’s Reading Reward Programme all about?
The programme allows participants to log their reading sessions on a government website. A reading session must last at least 15 minutes.
For each qualifying session, participants get 20 virtual coins. Only one rewarded reading session can be logged for each day under the basic system.
Once a participant has 1,000 coins, they will receive S$1. That means 50 reading sessions would earn them one Singapore dollar.
The monetary reward is small, but it’s not necessarily the only goal of the programme. The larger goal is to motivate people to read in their day-to-day life.
The programme is gamified, something that seems to be on the rise in health, education, and lifestyle programmes. Organisers hope that points and a measurable goal will be part of the motivation for participants to keep going.
It’s part of a five-year plan to develop a reading culture in Singapore and to make more people spend time reading books.
Why Singapore Is Targeting Doomscrolling
Doomscrolling is when you scroll through news, social media posts, and any other online page without a goal.
There is a huge amount of content on smartphones. The user has so much content to enjoy from a smartphone, and so much content at their disposal. A person might pick up their phone to read one message and then spend hours on the other apps.
At the same time, Singapore’s reading program has been coming at the same time as the debate on the negative effect that excessive use of social media has on kids and young adults. The nation has also been working to reduce the negative and harmful online experiences of children and teens.
The reading programme takes a different route, requiring people to take up some of their screen time with a task that requires sustained attention.
Melissa Tam, the National Library Board (NLB) chief in Singapore, said the programme was about establishing healthy reading habits through small and regular actions rather than expecting that people do things in a sudden way.
It’s pretty simple. Rather than denying smartphone use completely, people can establish a period in their day when they put the phone down and read by themselves.
From 15 minutes a day to Reading Habits
A more general question about how people spend their free time in an increasingly digital world, the programme also speaks to an age of digital reality.
When reading a book, it takes us longer than looking at short social media posts. And it’s hard to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time when we’re switching back and forth between videos, messages, and posts.
And that isn’t to say smartphones or digital media are harmful, or that everyone needs to read physical books. E-books, newspapers, magazines, and other reading methods can also provide ways to escape social media scrolling.
The Singapore initiative is not so much about rejecting technology as it is about creating a conscious alternative.
Singapore already has good educational and literacy outcomes. Singaporean students ranked first globally in reading literacy in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment, according to the new initiative.
The government has also used financial incentives before to encourage healthier habits, e.g., with programs to promote physical activity.
At the end of the day, whether little rewards can change people’s reading habits is not clear. But the experiment is an unusual solution to a familiar modern problem.
And for someone who spends 15 minutes scrolling through social media every evening, replacing that time with a few pages of a book may seem like a small change. Singapore’s approach is essentially asking people to make that small change consistently.
And if the habit sticks, the real reward may not be the S$1. It could simply be getting back into the habit of reading.
