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1. Introduction
The online distribution of e-books started in 1990, but progress remained slow until two events almost 20 years later. The first was Amazon’s establishment of the e-book store and release of the e-reader Kindle on November 19, 2007 (Amazon, 2007). The other was Apple’s release of iBooks and iPad in 2010 (Apple, 2010). These two events significantly influenced the development of the e-book market. Though Kindle and iBooks have become more and more popular worldwide, there have recently emerged a number of new competitor e-book stores, such as Barnes and Noble Nook Store, Kno e-Book Store, and Kobo e-Book Store. In Taiwan, three major telecommunication companies (Chunghwa Telecom, FarEasTone, and Taiwan Mobile) have their own e-book stores, which are HamiBook, FETnet e-book, and myBook, respectively. These telecom businesses give many special offers or discounts to attract customers to their stores. Nowadays, the e-book business has been intensified by the advent of reading e-books on mobile devices such as e-readers, smartphones, and tablets. Thus, the users can read e-books anytime and anywhere. These convenient devices bring e-books into people’s lives, and almost all online bookstores are adding the option to purchase e-books in addition to physical books. These phenomena suggest that numerous traditional bookstores and online bookstores selling physical books may one day be replaced by e-book stores exclusively selling e-books. The global e-book market is the fastest growing submarket in the worldwide book publishing industry. The share of the global e-book market was approximately 12.6 percent of the global book publishing market in 2014 and is expected to increase to 27.8 percent by 2019; in other words, it is forecasted to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 17.4 percent over the period 2014-2019 (ReportsnReports, 2014). In Taiwan, Rakuten Research recently found that over 6.4 million readers (56.4 percent of 18-49 year olds) in Taiwan are interested in e-books, but have yet to try them out seriously. Taiwan’s population is also very tech-savvy, with a smartphone penetration rate at over 92 percent. These data indicate a bright future for Taiwan’s e-book market (Rakuten Research, 2016).
As e-books are new phenomena in research settings, research questions arise in terms of the adoption and use by e-book-related industries (e.g. e-books, e-book stores, and e-book...