Fifteen Minutes

Since 6 September, the Singapore government has been paying its citizens to read. The amount is very modest: anyone who logs at least fifteen minutes of reading a day on a public platform earns 20 virtual coins. It takes a thousand coins to redeem one Singapore dollar and, since only one session can be logged per day, it takes fifty days of reading to earn about seventy euro cents. The initiative is called ReadSG. The National Library Board launched it as a campaign designed to run for five years, and its stated aim is to counter doomscrolling, the habit of endlessly scrolling through social media feeds almost without realising it.

What makes the story more curious is that Singapore is starting from a position of strength, given that its fifteen-year-olds rank among the best prepared in the world in the OECD’s PISA assessments. The government is therefore stepping in before the problem shows up in the numbers, in the same spirit in which it has previously offered shopping vouchers to people who walk more.

Nobody changes their habits for two cents a day, and if the experiment works, it will be for other reasons: the counter going up, the streak of consecutive days we wouldn’t want to break, the tiny but immediate reward. Our brains respond well to this kind of stimulus because they react to the anticipation of a reward, and this is the very mechanism underpinning the platforms the campaign wants to steer us away from. Singapore is trying to fight the scroll with its own weapons.

In Italy, according to ISTAT, 57.1% of the population read at least one book in the past year, compared with 60% in 2000, and more than 23 million people didn’t open a single one. The picture is less straightforward than it might seem, however. The Italian Publishers Association’s Observatory reports that in 2025 more people described themselves as readers, while the frequency of reading and the time spent on books both fell. In three years, the share of readers who open a book at least once a week dropped from 72% to 61%, and weekly hours spent on printed books fell from 3 hours 32 minutes to 3 hours 7 minutes. In other words, more people are reading, but less consistently.

Meanwhile, on an average day, Italians spend about 2 hours 40 minutes online, across work and leisure.

A study published in iScience in 2025, which analysed twenty years of American data, found that the share of people reading for pleasure on any given day is falling by about 3% a year, reaching just 16% in 2023. The authors describe a correlation with digital media use without being able to prove causation, and yet the picture matches what we see around us.

Attention, if we think about it, is also a resource. Each day provides a fixed amount that no technology can increase, and what we devote to one thing is taken away from everything else. Meanwhile, an entire economic sector earns in proportion to the time we spend on a platform, and it is built precisely to keep us there as long as possible.

Scholars call this the attention economy, and the authors of the iScience study themselves draw on the idea to explain the decline in reading, since activities compete for a limited amount of time and cognitive capacity.

To understand this better, think of a polluting factory. Its accounts show its revenues, but not the cost of the air we breathe, which falls on those living nearby and which economists therefore call an externality. Something similar happens with attention: whoever builds a platform earns according to the time we spend on it, while we bear the cost of that time, meaning everything else we could have done instead, without it appearing on anyone’s balance sheet.

As with water or soil, attention lacks a price to signal its scarcity, and we easily end up treating things that have no price as if they were inexhaustible. Seen from this angle, the Singapore experiment resembles an attempt to assign value to something that had none, making visible a cost that usually stays hidden. How well this can work, and for how long, remains to be seen.

There is no shortage of unknowns. Several studies suggest that financial rewards can weaken the motivation to continue once the reward ends. ReadSG also measures the time spent reading without saying anything about comprehension or the pleasure it brings, so no one yet knows whether the programme will create readers or just users of a new app.

If getting back to a book takes the same tricks that led us to put it down, what are we really trying to protect: reading or our attention?

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