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E-Government

Singapore launches mobile reading app

By Xinghui Guo | 29 June 2011

In a bid to encourage its 5 million population to pick up a book, the Singapore National Library Board (NLB) has launched a mobile reading app called MobileRead under the annual Read! campaign.

Launched on 23 June by Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts, Yaacob Ibrahim, MobileRead is a free application available on Apple’s AppStore. Books on MobileRead includes short local stories written in the country’s four official languages—English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil.

While the app and stories are free, only library members can download the stories for offline reading. Without login, only title list and abstracts can be viewed.

Since Read! first started in 2005, the campaign has reached more than 155,000 Singaporeans.

As of 2010, more than 4.5 million of the Singapore population are subscribed to mobile data services and the city state has a mobile phone penetration rate of more than 140 per cent.

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