The Role of Product Involvement in Digital and Physical Reading - a Comparative Study of Customer Reviews of eBooks vs. Printed Books

eBooks offer the reader a wide range of advantages compared to printed books. They are cheaper, lighter and, based on new e-ink technology, quite as good readable as printed books. Nevertheless, in important book markets such as Europe eBook acceptance is still relatively low. One reason for this reluctance is seen in the lack of haptic attributes by reading an eBook. But even if a person decides to read an eBook, she seems to read it in a different way than she would read a printed book. Flipping through pages, feeling the reading progress or touching the spine is not possible. The aim of this study is to show that the intangibility of eBooks leads to a lower involvement with the book. We used Amazon.com customer reviews as an indicator for the individual involvement of the review’s author. We could show that reviews of eBooks were shorter, more extreme in their star rating and rated as less helpful than reviews of printed books. Taken together, our results indicate that product involvement significantly differs between readers of digital and printed books. Practical implications are derived from our findings to reduce this gap in the future and limitations for further research are

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