Introduction
E-bookwas defined by (Suarez & Woudhuysen, 2010, p.164)"a text- and image-based publication in digital fromproduced on, published by, and readable on computers and other digital devices.E-books are presented visually or aurally, with the audio book as a precursor to, and limited exemplum of, electronic publishing's potential." With the appearance of e-book and e-devices (smart phones, iPods and iPads), the telecommunication companies, software developers, content providers and publishing industry were paying more attention on the growing industry. More and more people are getting used to read in e-devices. There is no doubt that those e-devices have influenced our society in some way. It seems to testify what Bill Gates (1999) had said "E-books promise to revolutionise the way the world reads." Even though there is no possible demise in the publishing market so far, the fact that the publishing industry is influenced by the digital fever is an accomplished fact.
Bookstores, as downstream retailers, open the gate for people to obtain knowledge. It could be an independent bookstore or a part of a chain. Generation passed, generation came. In order to follow the trend of time, large-scale bookstores like Eslite bookstore and King Stone bookstore in Taiwan, set up Internet bookstores to
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firmly stand by their marketing positions in publishing industry. However, technology changed with each passing day. As the appearance of e-readers (iPad, Kindle), if people want to read, all they have to do is to carry an e-reader with them, then there could contain hundreds or even thousands of articles there. As a result, e-book becomes more and more popular in the globe.
In the words of Li-Heng Lin (2012), he indicated the current situation of e-publishing industry in Taiwan in his abstract, "Many small publishers held back or rejected in terms of developing the digital-publishing, resulting in a situation that Taiwan has had plenty of e-book hardwares with little electronic book content." Even though the government in Taiwan had implemented many strategies for the digital-publishing, many small publishers still refused to involved in e-publishing industry.Taiwan published nearly 40 thousand books a year, but many of them were in translation from other languages into Chinese. As a result, if those publishing houses wanted to transform those books into electronic versions from the original publishing houses, it would cost a lot of money and also take a large proportion of the labour force to get the copyright from the original publishers.Therefore, most of the small-scale publishers considered e-publishing as a worthless business to develop.
This paper aimed to find out what difficulties bookstores and e-book might encounter in the future, how e-book would develop in the future, and what impact e-book caused on bookstores in Taiwan. Was the impact positive or negative? If it was negative, was there any solution for bookstores to compete with e-book? Small-scale publishers think there was no need to change the way they do businesses so far. But, how about in the future? And how about for the bookstores in Taiwan? As a result, this research took nearly a year to find out what the possible threatening factors that e-book would cause on bookstores in Taiwan and what future trend of e-book would be like in Taiwan.
This research conducted SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) analysis which was first introduced by Humphrey in 1960 (Friesner, n.d.). This analysis helped companies to have a clear grasp about what factors would affect their decision-making on the guiding principles of their strategic management. This research designed 127 survey questionnaires according to those questions which would be helpful to know consumer preference and opinions toward e-book and print book. It selected 127 participants of all ages who love reading as the survey sample and all the questionnaires were completed. The detailed results would be explained in the analysis and result section.
The overall paper was divided into the following sections. First, it explained the purpose for doing this research. Then, this research offered the historical background of e-book and bookstores in Taiwan and also the background of the research problems. Next, in theoretical framework and methodology sections, it explained how SWOT analysis would be used on study on the environmental factors that influenced the strategic management of e-book and bookstores in Taiwan, and it designed 127 questionnaires from different groups of people to know their preferences and opinions toward e-book and print book. Finally, this research analyzed the results of the questionnaires and of the SWOT analysis to understand how e-publishing development would influence bookstores and consumer preference in Taiwan.
Background:
The history of e-book was first available in July, 1971. It was a project (Project Gutenberg) launched byMichael Hart (Lebert, 2009, p.5). However, it was not popular until Amazon presented the e-device, Kindle, to the public in 2007. From 2007 to 2010, the volumes of the electronic books which Amazon provided readers to download with a little cost were increasing in an unbelievable way. The numbers raised from 300,000 to nearly 1 million. In 2010, Apple officially launched a line of the tablet computers, iPad (Li & Wei, 2011, p.34; Lin, 2012). With this appearance of these e-devices, the public tended to obtain the information through their hand-held devices.For many people, reading became an easier thing, because they did not have to endure theinconveniencecaused by bringing a lot of books. If they wanted to read, all they had to do is to bring an e-reader, then it could have a capacity of hundreds or even thousands of articles there.
E-book now becomes more popular. The rate of the usage of e-book is rapidly growing. InRise of e-reading (Brenner, Madden, Purcell, Raninie, & Zickuhr, 2012, p.3), it indicated, "One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year, and thisnumber increased following a gift- giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tabletcomputers and e-book reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks.In mid-December 2011,17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, theshare increased to 21%." This research showed that the number of e-reader owners in America was increasing rapidly. It explained that the businesses of selling e-devices were making more profits than they did before. As a result, the telecommunication companies, software developers, content providers and publishing industry were paying more attention on e-book market.
In Taiwan, the Executive Yuan implemented the strategies of e-publishing development in August, 2009. Publishers, content provider (CP), and Information Technology & Communication (ITC) in Taiwan set up Taiwan Digital Publishing Forum in 2008. They built a communication platform for e-publishing industry in Taiwan. Through this communication platform, they were able to obtain the latest news about the current development of e-publishing around the world, then find out the best strategies to boost the e-publishing in Taiwan. According to what Industrial Development Bureau, Ministry of Economic Affair reported in 2010, from 2002 to 2009, the output value of e-publishing had increased from 153 billion NT dollars to 460 billion NT dollars. The Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) was 16.96%. This growing industry drew the attention of large-scale publishing houses—Yuan-Liou publisher and the Cite publishers. These two large publishers decided to involve in the development of e-publishing because they found that they would make a lot of profits by sellingcontents in digital form (Lin, 2012).
If people consulted a dictionary like Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, it would tell people what a book means: a number of printed or written sheets of paper bound together in a cover. These places where books were sold and bought were bookstores (bookshops). The history of bookstores in Taiwan could be traced back to the age after Japan ended its colonization upon Taiwan. From 1950 until now, the development of publishing industry was vigorous. The content of the books were more diverse than before (Chen, Liao, Lin, & Wang, n.d., p.5). There were hundreds of bookstores in Taiwan. Bookstores had become our cultural legacy. As the trend of time, bookstores in Taiwan innovated the way they sell their products all the time. Kingstone bookstore and Eslite bookstore set up their Internet bookstores in 2000 and 2001 (Li, 2009).Consumers did not have to go to the physical stores in person where might be far away from their homes. They could purchase their products anywhere through the Internet. Then, with the invention of Kindles, iPads, the way how people read differed from how they did before. According to the online news presented by paper.udn.com (2009), as one of the most representative bookstores in Taiwan, Eslite bookstores involved in the development of e-publishing by coordinating with Fareastone, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in Taiwan in 2009. They aimed to combine the strengths of the whole publishing industries tomake a big progress on the development of e-book market.In 2010,they set up an online trading platform of e-book called eBookTown for customers to download. They provided novels, comics, magazines and so forth for their members with lower prices than the printed books (Su, 2010). Industrial Development Bureau, Ministry of Economic Affair predicts that the output value of e-publishing industry will raise to 780 billion NT dollars in 2013.
However, even though Taiwan had implemented many programs for e-publishing to develop in Taiwan and set up the goals for publishing industry, there were many small-scale publishers refused to develop e-publishing in their businesses. Taiwan published nearly 40 thousand of books a year, but many of them are in translation from other languages into Chinese. As a result, if those publishing houses wanted to transform those books into electronic versions from the original publishing houses, it would cost a lot of money and also take a large proportion of the labour force to get the copyright from the original publishers.Therefore, most of the small-scale publishers consider e-publishing as a worthless business to develop. This actual state resulted in a situation that Taiwan provided plenty e-book hardwares (e-devices) but little softwares (e-contents).
Theoretical Framework:
If e-books in Taiwan wanted to occupy a large proportion of the market share in the publishing industry, their profits would mostly come from those consumers who would be willing to purchase their content in digital format. However, in Taiwan, e-books were not as popular as other countries like China, the U.S. and Japan (Pan, 2011, p.92).Many publishers in Taiwan refused to involve in e-publishing because of the uncertainty of e-book market in Taiwan.Those publishers could not afford the possibility of losing a huge amount of money if they failed in this industry (Lin, 2012, p.92). By contrast, consumers in Taiwan expected publishers could release more e-books in Chinese version. It caused a vicious circle that decelerated e-books to develop in Taiwan.
If we considered what Li-Heng Lin (2012) explained in his study. In order to understand the factors that influenced publishers in Taiwan to involve in e-publishing, people had to be aware of how those publishers realize the environmental factors that affected their mechanisms in publishing market.
To understand how e-book development would influence bookstores and consumer preference in Taiwan, this research conducted a helpful analysis— SWOT analysis to narrow and focus on those research questions proposed by this research. By realizing the internal and external factors of e-books, this analysis would be helpful in the methodology section as the assistance to guide this research to a proper direction of what factors and how those factors would influence or influenced by the consumer preference when consumers decided to purchase whether the e-content or its print counterpart.
In the following section, this research was going to introduce SWOT analysis that would be conducted in this research.
- SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis
It was a helpful tool which was first introduced by Humphrey in 1960 (Friesner, n.d.) that could help companies realize their external factors (Opportunities and Threats) and internal factors (Strengths and Weaknesses) which would affect the decision-making on the guiding principles of their strategic management. For those publishers which wanted to involve in e-publishing in Taiwan, they must have a clear idea about the overall strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of e-publishing, so that those companies could improve or be good at their marketing management. By collecting the data from the finished questionnaires and information from other research papers, this research analysed what weaknesses and threats e-books had confronted in the publishing market in Taiwan, and factors would influence consumers’ decision-making when they were going to buy a book.
The overview of the SWOT analysis was divided into four categories: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and would be discussed as the followings below (Armstrong & Kotler, 2011, p.77-78).
A. Strengths (internal factors):
It included those positive factors, resources, and powers which might change as the companies were developing their businesses in the industries. It might help the companies to obtain more value from their target consumers. Strengths could be the assistance for companies to achieve their objectives.
B. Weaknesses (internal factors):
The situational shortcomings that might limit the companies’ performances and lose value from their consumers. By knowing their weaknesses, companies could improve their strategic management to earn more profits in the future.
C. Opportunities (external factors):
They were the attractive factors that might boost the companies to perform better in their marketplaces. Companies could use these attractive factors in their strengths to make their businesses more vigorous.
D. Threats (external factors):
They were unfavorable factors that might damage companies’ capabilities to grow and expand or even fail in their businesses. However, if companies could overcome those threatening factors, then it would be a chance for the companies to be stronger.
The two analyses designed a framework of how e-book might develop in Taiwan, what problems or opportunities e-books might confront as they developing in Taiwan, and through these analyses, this study would show how e-book and bookstores in Taiwan would react or influence to each other.
Methodology:
Research questions
The main purpose of conducting this research was to find out the influence of e-publishing development on bookstores in Taiwan and to analyse how e-book development would affect the consumer preference when they choose whether e-book or print book as their reading medium. The core idea of this research was explained by the following two questions:
1. What are the current and the future trends of e-book and print book?
2. How would e-publishing development influence the consumers' decision-making when they choose whether to use print book or e-book as their reading medium?
Method
Participants
The participants of this survey sample were those people who had the ability to read. This sample consisted of 200 participants from different genders and all ages of different generations.
Instruments
All of the participants were asked to respond 20 questions. Those questions were divided into 16 multiple choices, 3 open-ended questions, and 1 ranking question. They were separated into 5 sections:
Section1: The basic information about the participants
Section2: The reading habit when the participants used e-reader as their reading medium
Section3: The reading habit when the participants used print book as their reading medium
Section4: The basic information about how often the participants went to bookstores per month, and the factors that would influence participants’ decision making when they decided to buy a book or not.
Section5: An open-ended question of the possibility for e-book to replace bookstores in Taiwan in the future.
Procedure
This survey was conducted by using an online survey via a website called mySurvey (URL: It was put online on March 4, 2013 and closedon April 16, 2013. This was an online survey. The website address of this online survey was posted by the researcher on a social utility called Facebook, and all of the participants were asked to respond those questions which were related to e-publishing development, print book, and bookstores in Taiwan. After finishing these questionnaires, those participants would be asked to send the link to their friendsand their friends’ friends.
Data analysis
The results of the survey would be a tool to help the research analyze the factors that influenced the consumer preference when they were deciding whether to use e-readers or print books as their reading medium and how the consumer preference would influence the result of this study. SWOT analysis was also conducted based on the results of these questionnaires to explain and to reinforce the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of e-book and print book in Taiwan.