There's a new kind of side hustle in Singapore, and it pays in cents, not dollars. This month, the city-state's National Library Board kicked off a five-year national campaign designed to get people to put down their phones and pick up a book and get paid, however modestly, for doing it.
Log at least 15 minutes of reading on the program’s government website, and you earn 20 virtual coins. Rack up 1,000 of those coins, and you can cash out for the princely sum of SG$1 — about 80 US cents. Do the math and you're looking at roughly 50 days of consistent reading to earn a single dollar. Only one session counts per day, so there's no gaming the system by binge-logging on a Saturday.
The initiative comes out at a moment of real anxiety about what constant scrolling is doing to how and whether people read. Educators have taken to calling the phenomenon ‘brain rot’, shorthand for a perceived erosion of focus and depth caused by a steady diet of short-form digital content. Recent international rankings only sharpened the concern: reading scores among 15-year-olds in the United States have been sliding, even as countries like Singapore and China continue to perform strongly.
Researchers pointed to rising digital distraction inside classrooms as one likely culprit.
Singapore's National Institute of Education has framed the coin-and-cash mechanic as an attempt to gamify a habit that's otherwise hard to sell to a generation raised on infinite scroll — turning reading into something with visible, trackable progress.
Unsurprisingly, the scheme has stirred up some good-natured debate in Singapore over whether cash can manufacture something as intangible as a reading habit. Supporters see it as a low-stakes way to get people back in the habit after years away from books. Skeptics wonder whether the real marker of success isn't minutes logged at all, but whether people come out the other side more curious readers, not just more efficient coin collectors.
Reading clubs have been having something of a moment locally — including one aimed specifically at men who admit they haven't cracked open a book since starting their careers, discovering along the way that stepping back into reading often means venturing into genres they'd never have picked up before.
Beyond individual payouts, the National Library Board has also folded in a collective incentive: a charity drive tied to the program, with organisers hoping to bank 7.5 million cumulative reading minutes from participants this year. Hit that mark, and it unlocks a donation of up to SG$150,000 to charity.
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