Empirical Research On College Students’ Digital Reading Behavior Based On The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)

The rise and development of digital publishing sparks the age of digital reading. Compared to the traditional reading, digital reading is widely accepted and loved by young people because of a serious of advantages, including convenience, mobility, low-cost, ease of storage, etc. However, it seems that digital reading and traditional reading take on game-playing relationship during the transition period. The paper focuses on digital reading and the factors affecting the acceptance of digital reading, using qualitative and quantitative methods.In the part of qualitative research, the multi-angle, comparative analysis of digital reading and traditional reading as well as the consumer insight are the basis of further research. Meanwhile, the paper raises the opinion that it’s necessary to do distinguish research under different reading purpose, thus does the comparative research on digital academic reading and digital leisure reading as well as the study on the transformation from digitally received to paper reading during the digital academic reading. Besides, the paper analyzes the differences under demographic variables including gender, age, region, educational background, academic background and draws the conclusion from the perspectives of content, subject, terminal equipment, time, frequency, behavior, satisfaction, consumption, attitude towards advertisement.In the part of quantitative research, the paper builds modeling by adding four factors, Perceived Enjoyment, Perceived Accessibility, Perceived Cost, Perceived socialness, based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), making up the subjective and exogenous factors’limitations.1121 students from Fudan University are the participants of the survey. The response rate is about 87.2% and 977 questionnaires are available. This study adopts the Likert-Scale five-point measure questionnaire to explore the attitudes towards digital reading. The attained data are processed via descriptive statistics, Chi-square test, t test, Pearson product-moment correlation analysis. The result shows that eight hypothesis of the study are all proved. Four new variables all have significant positive impact on the attitude towards digital reading.Perceived Socialness (PS), including Subjective Norm, Social Influence, Network Externalities, has a positive effect on the acceptance and adoption of digital reading.Perceived Accessibility(PA), including the accessibility of reading content and reading devices, has a positive impact on the acceptance and adoption of digital reading.Perceived Cost (PC), including the cost of reading content and reading devices, has a positive impact on the acceptance and adoption of digital reading.Perceived Enjoyment (PE) which is the fun of digital reading and the flow experience has a positive impact on the acceptance and adoption of digital reading.Of course, there are some limitations during the research, such as the representation of data and the limitation of college students as respondents, which are supposed to be improved.