The synergy between eBooks and printed books in Brazil

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss reading habits in relation to printed books and eBooks. Design/methodology/approach – The study was structured in two steps: first, an online survey was used to trace a general profile of a group of Brazilian readers who had had previous contact with digital books. Second, a subset of respondents was invited to participate in open-ended interviews. Interviewees were chosen according to their responses to the profiling questionnaire. All interviews were semi-structured. Findings – The results indicate the existence of a synergy between digital and paper books. The decision between reading one or the other depends on several factors, amongst which the authors emphasise online accessibility, reading motivation (for work or for leisure), intended modes of use and appropriation, circumstances of use and emotional factors. Other elements of importance are the corporeality of the readers and the materiality of the devices used for reading. Originality/value – The departure point of the study was the perception that, in Brazil, the arrival of digital books was accompanied by an increase in the sales of printed books. This contradicts the idea that digital books and printed books are concurrent, and the growth of the eBooks market will inevitably lead to a decrease in the revenue from printed books. The initial hypothesis was that digital and printed books could be complementary. Addressing this question required knowledge of readers’ experience with and opinion of printed and digital books. The results of the qualitative study suggest that the relation between these two types of publication is not one of alternatives, but instead is one of synergy. Specific aspects of this synergy are highlighted in the paper.

Exploring the Determinants of Digital Content Adoption By Academics: The Moderating Role of Environmental Concerns and Price Value

“…Nowadays, high-speed internet connectivity has made digital content accessible to users anywhere, anytime, and at a relatively lower cost compared with the traditional print version. Digital content refers to any electronic data and information in a digital form that can be retrieved and read through computer screens or smart devices (Rockinson-Szapkiw et al, 2013;Sehn & Fragoso, 2015). It has also attracted the attention of publishers who are making efforts to provide ubiquitous digital material that may be used without time and space constraints (Chen et al, 2012).…”

Strategic Analysis of the Pricing Mechanisms in an Online Book Supply Chain in the Presence of Reference Price Effects

“…Consumers are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay V, which is uniformly distributed over [0, 1] and the total market size is normalized to one. A Statista.com survey shows that 56% of US consumers agree with the statement that e-books should be cheaper than printed versions [48] and that consumers always value the e-version of books less than the printed version [14,15]. Thus, consistent with Tan and Carrillo [25] and Cheng, et al [1], we assume that e-books are vertically differentiated from printed books.…”

“…Our study aims to theoretically investigate the interaction between publisher and online retailer, and how the publisher decision on the cover price of print influences the selling discount and further influence consumer's behavior, thus we establish a Stackelberg game and assume the publisher to be the leader. Moreover, we model the printed book and its e-version as vertically differentiated goods since consumers value books' e-version less than the printed version [14,15]. In a publication's newly released stage, the publisher decides whether to release both versions of the book simultaneously or only a printed edition.…”

Exploring Cloud-Based Bookstore Continuance from a Deconstructed Task–Technology Fit Perspective

“…Previous literature focused on the motivators for users to read or continuously read e-books [1,7,8], or even to make the choice of e-books over printed books [9], which would surely advance our understanding of e-book-related topics. With the increasing availability of e-books, we argue that it is time to investigate how to better manage those e-books via cloud-based bookstores, which is a subject that few studies have yet to explore [10,11].…”