Consumer Acceptance of Electronic Reading Devices

Introduction

Mobile devices have become an integral part of our life as a personal communication medium and as a tool to express oneself (Karjaluoto et al., 2005; Liang & Wei, 2004). Mobile devices and the ecosystem that has emerged have attracted considerable research attention in recent years. Among the research areas are mobile phone acceptance (Karjaluoto et al., 2005), mobile advertising and marketing (Barnes, 2002; Scharl et al., 2005) and mobile services (Westerlund et al., 2009; Vatanparast, 2010; Phan & Daim, 2011). In a more fine grained fashion, studies have also been conducted regarding user experience of portable reading devices (Pattuelli & Rabina, 2010; Clark et al., 2008) and reading processes (Schcolnik, 2001).

Consumer research has still devoted limited attention to the underlying reasons for the adoption of mobile devices. Exception being Karjaluoto et al. (2005), who found that price is major factor for buying a mobile phone. Still, the nascent area of electronic reading devices lacks research on the underlying reasons for electronic reading device acceptance. It is however noted that there has been qualitative interview based research on the consumer attitudes towards book digitization and usage of electronic reading devices (Chen & Granitz, 2011) but a large scale study depicting the reasons for the adoption of these devices is still lacking.

As the market of table devices and various electronic reading devices is increasing rapidly and digital media is increasingly consummated via these devices it is pertinent to understand the adoption of these devices. In here we use broad term electronic reading device (encompassing Samsung Galaxy Tab, Microsoft Surface, Kindle Fire and other similar sized color screen devices) but survey focused to most used device in Finland that is Apple iPad.

Hence, this research aims to address this by focusing on the individual level attitudes toward electronic reading devices. Therefore, our research question can be stated as:

This article is organized as follows: first literature review is conducted which is followed by the presentation of research design. Then analysis and results are provided. Finally conclusions are drawn.

Literature Review

First we provide an overview of electronic media devices and the publishing industry to lay a common ground for understanding of adoption of such devices in the context of newspaper markets. Then we continue to the acceptance of technology discussion.