The 4th Industrial Revolution that comes to the fore with the Digital Transformation and Hyper-Connected Society causes rapid industrial changes based on information technology. These industrial changes accelerate various changes in the traditional in...
The 4th Industrial Revolution that comes to the fore with the Digital Transformation and Hyper-Connected Society causes rapid industrial changes based on information technology. These industrial changes accelerate various changes in the traditional industries as well as the IT industry.
Typically, the publishing industry is an industry for mainly printing and distributing paper books, which has been settled as a human-friendly medium for a long time. And yet, after the 90s, because of the appearance of various information media devices along with the spread of the Internet, e-books (electronic books) appeared, which would replace paper books, and the earlier e-book market was mainly concentrated on Business to Consumer (B2C) field. By the late 90s, as the publication of e-books became in earnest, the publishing industry turned into a form of publishing paper books and e-books in parallel. Especially, the earlier e-book market mainly was operated by purchases of e-books like purchases of paper books, but recently, as the traditional subscription services expanded with the sharing economy, they spread to various service industries.
In the domestic e-book field, subscription services first appeared in 2013, and now, most are subscription services of purchasing the service vouchers for using the service for a certain time, rather than the purchase for possessing e-books. Because of these changes, as the e-book industry gradually evolved and developed itself into a customer-oriented business model, unlike the traditional publishing industry, which remains in the period of growth retardation, the e-book market shows a very fast growth. However, despite various change factors, as the size of the e-book market is 5% of the total publishing market, it is still a very limited scale compared to the size of the entire publishing market (The Korea Economic Daily, October 29, 2019).
Especially, there are various efforts for technological progress, the standardization of e-books, and the selection of specifications, but the market expansion is still little as an alternative to the traditional paper books, and the competition between manufacturers that provide various e-book platforms is gradually deepening.
In addition, as for the characteristics of e-books differentiated from those of paper books, as information devices in which contents, software, hardware, and networks are combined, analyzing what characteristics have positive impacts on user satisfaction and behavior intention would have an important meaning in terms of the expansion of the e-book market and industrial revitalization.
Thus, this study analyzed the relationship of the impacts of the e-book subscription service on user satisfaction and behavior intention. Especially, as for the characteristic factors of the e-book subscription service, stable operation of contents based on hardware-wise characteristics, system quality based on usability, information quality related to content characteristics, service quality related to the subscription service, and the subscription service price were chosen as the factors, and this study analyzed the relationship of the impacts of these factors on user satisfaction and behavior intention.
As for analysis samples, with the users of four domestic e-book subscription service providers, an online survey was conducted, and finally, samples of 250 persons were formed, and utilizing them as the analysis samples, this study conducted an empirical analysis of research models.
The results of the main analysis of this study are presented as follows.
First, it turned out that the system quality, information quality, and price of the e-book subscription service had significant impacts on user satisfaction, and Hypothesis 1.1, Hypothesis 1.2, and Hypothesis 1.4 were all adopted, and the subscription service price factor had the greatest impact on user satisfaction, which is a result that reflected users’ rational consumption behavior.
Second, as a result of an analysis of the hypotheses on the relationship between e-book subscription service and behavior intention, service quality and subscription service price had significant impacts on behavior intention, Hypothesis 2.3 and Hypothesis 2.4 were adopted. This results of an empirical analysis that the factors affecting user satisfaction are different from those affecting behavior intention, of the e-book subscription service factors. For the continuous use and acquisition of new customers, it would be necessary to make a strategic approach to increase the service quality of the e-book subscription service, unlike user satisfaction. In addition, it turned out that the subscription service price factor turned out to be a common factor of user satisfaction and behavior intention.
Third, as a result of an analysis of the hypotheses on user satisfaction and behavior intention, user satisfaction had significant impacts on behavior intention that measured continuous use intention and intention of recommendation to others. This was consistent with the existing studies that as a predictive index of behavior intention, user satisfaction had a positive impact on behavior intention.