Factor affecting the intention to adopt e-book apps

Abstract

The e-book was introduced and adopted in 1971, and has since become part of the publishing market. E-book apps have also been developed and launched in society as a program to support e-books for readers to read via electronic devices. As a result, the e-book apps market in Thailand has slowly increased in terms of sales and the adoption rate. This quantitative research aimed to identify the factors influencing the readers’ intention to adopt e-book apps by applying the diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory. Five perceived characteristics of innovation comprising relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability were taken as the independent variables, and the intention to adopt e-book apps was taken as the dependent variable. 398 people, who had purchased books in the past three months (April- June 2021), were recruited as the sample of the study using convenience sampling. Data were collected by an online survey and analyzed by descriptive statistics and multiple regressions. The results indicated that the compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability factors had a significant impact on the intention to adopt e-book apps. However, relative advantage did not have any impact on the intention to adopt the apps. These findings would provide managerial implications and action plans for publishers, marketers, and application developers to offer e-book apps that would be compatible with readers' lifestyles and fulfil their expectations. Application developers should design applications which are user-friendly, have guidelines on how to use them, and provide a program that would be easy and safe for the purchases of e-books via an application. Furthermore, marketers should conduct social advertisement campaigns and find relevant reviewers and bloggers to promote e-book apps.