Have they ever paid you to read a book? In Singapore there is a new challenge program created for the month of reading: it is called ReadSG, it is an initiative of the National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore and was born with the declared aim of detaching people from social media and doomscrolling to bring them back to the pages of a book, paying them on a piecework basis. You can participate in the initiative “to save citizens from brainrot” through an app: when you open it, a timer is activated which stays active for 15 minutes, during which you can dedicate yourself to reading. At the end of a quarter of an hour, you get a reward, twenty virtual coins, and you can have one session per day. For every 1000 coins accumulated, you get one dollar of the local currency (equal to approximately 70 euro cents).
It takes about fifty days of reading to earn those seventy cents, and over 365 days you get 7,300 coins (i.e. about 5 euros), so no one will get rich, but Singapore hopes with this method to lead to improved concentration, critical thinking and imagination. The idea behind ReadSG is based on a psychological bet: that an action driven by a microscopic reward of money, repeated daily, can turn into a habit. «We know that habits are built through small, consistent actions, so we’re starting with a small goal of reading for just 15 minutes a day. On the bus, before bed or during the lunch break,” said Melissa Tam, head of the National Library Council. But, taking a step back, can you really buy the desire to do something?
Reward studies: when it works and when it doesn’t
In 1973, at a preschool associated with Stanford, three psychology researchers studied the effect of rewards on some children who particularly liked to draw. They divided them into groups: to some they promised a diploma-reward if they continued to draw, while to others they promised nothing. For a couple of weeks, Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett they observed them during free play and published the results in the study Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis.. The children who had been promised a reward drew less than before and much less than those who had not received the reward. The expectation of a reward, in some way, had reduced the children’s interest rather than nourished it: this is the phenomenon that psychologists call overjustification effect, so when we receive an external reward for an activity that we already liked, the brain “rewrites” the motivation.
There is another experiment done in 2011 by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer (Financial Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from Randomized Trials), which published the results of a gigantic series of tests conducted in hundreds of American schools on academic performance, costing millions of dollars. In some schools and cities, children were paid for the results they obtained (high grades and good test scores), while in others for completing certain actions (attending lessons, reading books, etc.). Paying for results almost never worked (grades didn’t rise), while paying for actions had consequences. The most eloquent case is that of Dallas, where second graders received $2 for each book read (with a cap per semester), on one condition: they had to pass a small quiz on reading comprehension, answering at least 80% of the questions correctly.
Fryer’s experiments show that the effects of incentives also depend on what is rewarded and on the context. ReadSG similarly adopts a mechanism where you choose to pay for a concrete actionrather than for an abstract result. It remains to be seen whether this incentive will help transform reading into a lasting habit.
Can you build a habit? It takes an average of 66 days
There is a condition for all this to work and the behavior actually becomes habit (i.e. in an automatism that the brain carries out without needing to be convinced every time), without being abandoned after a short while. As we had already explained to you in another article, in fact, 21 days are not enough to create a habit: the most reliable estimate comes from a study by a psychologist Phillippa Lallypublished in 2010 (How are habits formed: Modeling habit formation in the real world) in the European Journal of Social Psychology, according to which they serve on average 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, with a huge interval depending on the person and the difficulty of the gesture (the estimate ranged from 18 days to drink a glass of water on a diet up to 254 for more demanding habits).
The Singapore mechanism (one session a day, every day, for months) lends itself to being read in the light of these studies: even a short but repeated session can somehow favor the formation of a habit, even if there is no precise number of days valid for everyone, and the reward is not the goal, but the bait that keeps the person incentivized to repeat the behavior long enough for it to consolidate. As the director of the National Library Council said, the philosophy is that of “constant small actions”.
The flip side remains: a 2016 study (J. Guryan, JS Kim and KH Park, Motivation and incentives in education: Evidence from a summer reading experiment) published in Economics of Education Review, conducted as part of a summer reading program, showed that these incentives work much better on those who were already somewhat motivated to begin with, while they may not reach as effectively the less motivated and more reluctant (precisely those who such a campaign would like to conquer). Paying to read, in short, could give the final push to those who are already predisposed, rather than converting those who are not. If ReadSG manages to move them too, it will be a small social experiment of enormous interest.
Who has already tried it in the world: examples
Singapore is not an isolated case: there are examples of countries all over the world that are trying to intervene, with different strategies, on the relationship between reading and digital technologies.
- The United Kingdom has proclaimed 2026 the National Year of Reading, promoted by the Department for Education, created with the National Literacy Trust under the slogan “Go All In”, to counteract what the promoters call “a profound decline in the pleasure of reading” and lead to rediscovering it. In this case there is no monetary incentive, but a large plan of events and initiatives between schools and libraries.
- The United Arab Emiratesthey launched a national law on reading as early as 2016 and are carrying out the famous Arab Reading Challenge, a competition that offers prizes of up to one million dirhams (around 235 euros), involving millions of students from all over the Arab world and encouraging them to read as many books as possible (over 50) within an academic year.
- THE’Australia chooses the path of prohibition, attacking the problem from the opposite side: no more books, but less screen. Since December 2025 it has become the first country in the world to ban social networks for those under 16 (from Instagram to TikTok to YouTube). It is a challenge that all governments are observing carefully: Singapore itself is considering limiting the time on social media for minors.
- There Chinafrom 1 February 2026, has a national regulation in force on the promotion of reading: extended library hours, coordinated funding, a National Reading Week in April. «The regulation», we read, «aims to raise the intellectual, moral, scientific and cultural standards of the Chinese people and improve the general civic sense of society, contributing to China’s efforts to transform itself into a country with a strong socialist culture. (…) The regulation also emphasizes the need to scientifically plan and build public reading facilities and support the integration between digital and traditional reading. It also requires digital reading service providers to strengthen content management and offer high-quality digital products. The curious thing? In China the “reading rate” is not in crisis, but rather growing (it was 51.7% in 2004, it reached 82.1% in 2024).
