The e-book reader, Kindle, which Amazon.com officially promoted in November, 2007, has caught the eye of global market, and the sale volumes reached 500,000 in 2008(Bureau of Industrial Development, MOEA, 2009). Moreover, the Kindle2 promoted in March, 2009, has also created a good performance. The success in Kindle lets many Taiwanese manufacturers think the feasibility of developing the e-book reader market in Taiwan. Therefore, this research uses Innovation-Decision Process (Rogers, 2003) and New Product Adoption Model (Holak, 1988) to study the effects of perceived attributes of innovation, include relative advantage, compatibility and complexity, on purchase intention Taiwanese having. Furthermore, the influences about substitutes and reading habits on the purchase intention were also discussed in this study. According to the possible consumer groups, this research focus on Taiwanese who live in Taiwan now and who must be office workers had college degree or be university, graduate, or PhD students. The period of survey was from March 19 to April 18 in 2010 and the questionnaires were handed out through personal interview and e-mail. The number of questionnaires collected is 202 and only 158 questionnaires had confirmed to the standard the study requested. In 158 questionnaires, 42% are office workers and 58% are students; 59% are male and 41% are female; the age distribution of 158 questionnaires is from 20 to 59 years old, and 58% are in the range 20 to 29 years old; About the disposable monthly income, 40% are in the rang NT$5,000 to NT$9,999; 85% are live in south of Taiwan. The findings showed: (1) At present, Only 28% respondents have the purchase intention of e-book reader (selling price for NT$10,000 about); (2) The first three factors which attract Taiwanese to purchase an e-book reader include easy to carry (70%), saving the space to store paper books (40%), and easy to read when you are moving (37%); (3) The relative advantage affected the purchase intention positively; (4) The degree respondents approved of reading paper books usually was positively correlated with purchase intention; (5) The purchase intention was higher when respondents had netbooks or smartphones, and more items of substitutes they had.

This dissertation introduces a novel automated book reader as an assistive technology tool for persons with blindness. The literature shows extensive work in the area of optical character recognition, but the current methodologies available for the automated reading of books or bound volumes remain inadequate and are severely constrained during document scanning or image acquisition processes. The goal of the book reader design is to automate and simplify the task of reading a book while providing a user-friendly environment with a realistic but affordable system design. This design responds to the main concerns of (a) providing a method of image acquisition that maintains the integrity of the source (b) overcoming optical character recognition errors created by inherent imaging issues such as curvature effects and barrel distortion, and (c) determining a suitable method for accurate recognition of characters that yields an interface with the ability to read from any open book with a high reading accuracy nearing 98%. This research endeavor focuses in its initial aim on the development of an assistive technology tool to help persons with blindness in the reading of books and other bound volumes. But its secondary and broader aim is to also find in this design the perfect platform for the digitization process of bound documentation in line with the mission of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a nonprofit Alliance at making reading materials available in digital form. The theoretical perspective of this research relates to the mathematical developments that are made in order to resolve both the inherent distortions due to the properties of the camera lens and the anticipated distortions of the changing page curvature as one leafs through the book. This is evidenced by the significant increase of the recognition rate of characters and a high accuracy read-out through text to speech processing. This reasonably priced interface with its high performance results and its compatibility to any computer or laptop through universal serial bus connectors extends greatly the prospects for universal accessibility to documentation.

The e-book reader has become one of the most popular consumer electronics goods since the Amazon Kindle first launched in the end of year 2007; it has led the trend of e-book worldwide. E-book reader not only sold very well in North America, the sales increased very fast in Asia and Europe. According to FIND (2010), the global total sales of e-book reader is 3.6 million pieces in 2009, and it increased almost 80% in 2010. This shows that the e-book reader has become more and more popular. Taiwan is the most important country of e-book reader supply chain, which not only predominate the key techniques and patent but also takes OEM / ODM orders worldwide. Despite the advantage of the hardware development, the use of e-book readers is not common in Taiwan. Therefore the purposes of this research are to explore the factors that would influence user¡¦s adaptive behavior of e-book readers. This research based on technology acceptance model (TAM), and extends with ¡§Compatibility¡¨, ¡§Observability¡¨ and ¡§Perceived complementarity¡¨ as external variables to investigate the factors influencing consumer usage of e-book reader. The analytical results are as below: 1. ¡§Compatibility¡¨ has positive significant effect on both ¡§Perceived Usefulness¡¨ and ¡§Perceived Ease of Use.¡¨ 2. ¡§Observability¡¨ has positive significant effect on both ¡§Perceived Usefulness¡¨ and ¡§Perceived Ease of Use.¡¨ 3. ¡§Perceived complementarity¡¨ has positive significant effect on both ¡§Perceived Usefulness¡¨ and ¡§Perceived Ease of Use,¡¨ but has no significant effect on¡§Behavioral Intention.¡¨ 4. Both ¡§Perceived Usefulness¡¨ and ¡§Perceived Ease of Use¡¨ have positive significant effect on¡§Behavioral Intention.¡¨

The current study attempted to examine the roles of product functions and form in consumers¡¦ mind when they encounter a new product with state-of-the-art technology. Also, the study tried to explore and understand the moderating effects of consumption schema and using situations on technology acceptance. The research picked e-book reader as the experimental product, while used qualitative research method with phenomenological approach. There were 12 key informants participating separately in the in-depth interviews. Eleven of them are foreign graduate students in the NSYSU. The phenomenological one-to-one interviews were conducted in three phases in different days and with particular aspects of technology acceptance, that is, reading schema, technology beliefs, responses to e-book reader, and the using situations. Findings of the study revealed that positive beliefs and affective connection with the product emerge once consumers find the conformity between product functions, form and their reading schema expectations. Regarding specific situations, consumers have certain goals to be fulfilled. Questions in the survey scale of acceptance confirmed people¡¦s adoption when they see the products meet their goals.

Science fiction has long promised the digitalization of books. Characters in films and television routinely check their palm-sized (or smaller) electronic displays for fast-scrolling information. However, this very technology, increasingly prevalent in today's world, has not been embraced universally. While the convenience of pocket-sized information pieces has the techno-savvy entranced, the general public still greets the advent of the e-book with a curious reluctance. This lack of enthusiasm seems strange in the face of the many advantages offered by the new medium - vastly superior storage capacity, searchability, portability, lower cost, and instantaneous access. This dissertation addresses the need for research examining the reading comprehension and the role emotional response plays in the perceived performance on e-document formats as compared to traditional paper format. This study compares the relative reading comprehension on three formats (Kindle, iTouch, and paper) and examines the relationship of subject's emotional response and relative technology exposure as factors that affect how the subject perceives they have performed on those formats. This study demonstrates that, for basic reading comprehension, the medium does not matter. Furthermore, it shows that, the more uncomfortable a person is with technology and expertise in the requested task (in this case, reading), the more they cling to the belief that they will do better on traditional (paper) media - regardless of how well they actually do.

The objective of this dissertation is to provide a new design approach to a fully automated book reader for individuals with visual impairment and blindness that is portable and cost effective. This approach relies on the geometry of the design setup and provides the mathematical foundation for integrating, in a unique way, a 3-D space surface map from a low-resolution time of flight (ToF) device with a high-resolution image as means to enhance the reading accuracy of warped images due to the page curvature of bound books and other magazines. The merits of this low cost, but effective automated book reader design include: (1) a seamless registration process of the two imaging modalities so that the low resolution (160 x 120 pixels) height map, acquired by an Argos3D-P100 camera, accurately covers the entire book spread as captured by the high resolution image (3072 x 2304 pixels) of a Canon G6 Camera; (2) a mathematical framework for overcoming the difficulties associated with the curvature of open bound books, a process referred to as the dewarping of the book spread images, and (3) image correction performance comparison between uniform and full height map to determine which map provides the highest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) reading accuracy possible. The design concept could also be applied to address the challenging process of book digitization. This method is dependent on the geometry of the book reader setup for acquiring a 3-D map that yields high reading accuracy once appropriately fused with the high-resolution image. The experiments were performed on a dataset consisting of 200 pages with their corresponding computed and co-registered height maps, which are made available to the research community (cate-book3dmaps.fiu.edu). Improvements to the characters reading accuracy, due to the correction steps, were quantified and measured by introducing the corrected images to an OCR engine and tabulating the number of miss-recognized characters. Furthermore, the resilience of the book reader was tested by introducing a rotational misalignment to the book spreads and comparing the OCR accuracy to those obtained with the standard alignment. The standard alignment yielded an average reading accuracy of 95.55% with the uniform height map (i.e., the height values of the central row of the 3-D map are replicated to approximate all other rows), and 96.11% with the full height maps (i.e., each row has its own height values as obtained from the 3D camera). When the rotational misalignments were taken into account, the results obtained produced average accuracies of 90.63% and 94.75% for the same respective height maps, proving added resilience of the full height map method to potential misalignments.

由於資訊科技與顯示技術的大幅進步，電子書閱讀裝置成為近來十分受矚目的產品，然綜觀目前國內外電子書的發展，多以較具消費能力的上班族為對象，較少以基礎教育的學生為目標使用者。 本研究針對使用於教育市場的電子書閱讀器進行前導性的實驗，並透過自行設計的使用者介面、數位學習平台及結合傳統問卷與自動化使用者行為蒐集程式，結合質化研究與量化分析的優點，以瞭解最真實的學生使用習慣與方式。 本研究目的在於探索電子書閱讀器進入高中學生的實際課堂學習與日常生活之中，對學生的學習經驗或閱讀習慣所產生之影響，並進一步瞭解從學生最初接觸電子書的新鮮試用期，到後續逐漸習慣使用或棄用電子書等不同階段的行為變化。透過此研究，瞭解電子書閱讀器應用於教育市場的接受程度及可能潛力，做為未來電子書設計、開發與推廣使用的可行性參考依據。 / Recently, e-book reading devices based on electronic ink (e-ink) have gained a lot of attention thanks to the rapid advances in both information and display technology. However, current products are mainly targeted on general users for their daily reading activities. Research on introducing the e-reading device into high school or college campuses has commenced only quite recently. In this thesis, we exploit the potential of employing e-book reading devices in facilitating learning in a high school campus. We have custom-designed the user interface as well as the textbook content to suit the needs of this particular user group. The unique opportunity of having access to the hardware device, software design and potential users creates an ideal experimental platform for us to unbiasedly investigate the role of this new technology through a long-term user behavior collection and analysis process. This study aims to explore how the introduction of e-book reader into high school campus influences the students’ learning and daily life. We documented changes in the users’ e-book reading behavior during the course of a six-month experiment, corresponding to progressive stages of growing familiarity and comfort with using the machine. We found that e-book reader does help the students to develop a habit of mobile reading. Its effect exceeds our expectation of achieving digital learning. We hope that the findings presented in this thesis can be useful to teachers and system designers to develop new types of teaching materials and activities by taking advantages of the characteristics of this new technology.

在這個新世代，人類在閱讀上已顛覆以往的習慣，電子書閱讀器市場潛力與行銷發展也形成巨大的空間及無限的商機，是新世紀的商業新潮流，由於Kindle 電子書閱讀器的熱賣，電子書閱讀器市場，似乎又邁入另一個高峰。也因此造就了電子紙應用市場也跟著快速成長；台灣廠商繼Notebook後, 似乎找到另一個新藍海產業。本研究針對電子書閱讀器其起源、發展、市場及行銷策略上作一探討及研究 其中最關鍵元件－電子紙模組之供應商即為”元太科技工業股份有限公司”，它占了電子紙90％的市場，為電子紙的全球最大供應商，因此本研究以”元太”為主要研究對象，來探討其供應鏈、經營策略、經營績效等，藉此了解電子書閱讀器的市場、應用面及未來創新發展。 本研究將配合波特的五力分析、SWOT分析加上政府政策、電子書閱讀器產業技術、市場及競爭等面向進行探討，並採用個案分析法，進行次級資料分析及人物訪談，藉此分析出該產業各作用力強弱組合，並進一步瞭解所欲進入該產業之廠商將面臨之挑戰。接著探討電子書閱讀器產業內的參與者及其相互關係，以台灣目前電子紙領導廠商「元太科技」為例做說明。得知電子書閱讀器確能確實滿足人類的根本需要，符合現階段的社會要求。架構出電子書閱讀器產業的關鍵成功因素以及電子書閱讀器的未來應用及商機潛力，以作為國內發展電子書閱讀器紙廠商之參考。透過分析，本研究發現電子書閱讀器產業關鍵成功因素在於技術突破及創造新市場應用，如此才能推動電子書閱讀器的產業變革，使其多元應用、商機無限，讓真正的無紙化時代來臨。 / In the new generation of human, reading has been the habit of subversion in the past. It is a new business trend of another century that the market potential and marketing development of e-book reader have developed a huge space and unlimited business opportunities. As a result of the best selling of e-book reader Kindle, the market of e-book reader seems to be advanced into another level. Therefore, it has also achieved the rapid growth of the application market of electronic paper. It seems that the manufactures in Taiwan explore another new industry of Blue-Sea following the Notebook. In this study, it has been taken a deep investigation and research from the origin, development, market and marketing strategy of the e-book reader. The PVI Industrial Co., Ltd, a supplier of the module of electronic paper which is one of the most critical element, accounts for 90% of the market of electronic paper and is the largest supplier in the world of the electronic paper. Therefore, PVI is applied as the main object in this study to explore its supply chain, marketing strategy, business performance, etc., in order to learn about the market, the application of innovation and future development of e-book reader. In this study, it is to explore by using Porter's five strength analyses, SWOT analysis, government policy, the industry technology of e-book reader, market and competition, etc. and also adopt the case analysis, the secondary data analysis and interviews. Therefore, it is to learn more about the challenge to face for which wants to enter this industry by using this analysis of the industrial strength mix of every effort. Then, it is to explore the participants and their mutual relations within the industry of the e-book reader. Based on the leading manufacturer of electronic paper in Taiwan "PVI" as an example of illustration. It is learned that E-book reader that can really meet with the basic needs of human beings, in accordance with the social requirements at this stage. It is to show the structure of the e-book reader industry that the key success factors as well as e-book reader applications in the future and potential opportunities to develop e-book reader as a domestic manufacturer of paper for reference. In this study through analysis, it is found that the key success factors of e-book reader industry is the creation of new technological breakthroughs and market applications, therefore, in order to promote the changes of e-book reader industry, so that to make multiple applications, business opportunities and the real paperless era .

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-16T15:23:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 3910875 bytes, checksum: fe8e0ceeddd3885a927a4d933ea6633d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This research analyzed the Information Architecture (IA) for reading interface of ebooks provided by the Kindle III WiFi software, from the perspective of the four fundamental principles of IA for Web, defined by Peter Morville e Louis Rosenfeld, identified as: organization system, navigation system, labeling system and search system. The research was made by applying on-line questionnaire consisting of open and closed variables, with real and potential users of Kindle III WiFi. The inquired public was composed by the professors of the pos-graduation program in Information Science of Federal University of Paraíba (PPGCI-UFPB), and from the same institution, graduation students of Archival and Library Science. The analysis of the closed questions was made through a software used in surveys to gather information, called Encuestafacil.com. The analysis of the open questions was made by categorization , wich is one of the steps in the content analysis technique. With the results, it was possible to identify faults in Information Architecture of the interface of Kindle III WiFi software, mainly about the organization and labeling systems. However, strengths can also be listed, since the mentioned interface meets some criteria defined by Morville and Rosenfeld among other authors, considering as good quality an interface that meets the Information Architecture principles. The study results are great evidence that much progress is needed in the conception of better interfaces, thus, underlining the need for deeper studies about IA in e-book reader software. / Na pesquisa foi analisada a Arquitetura da Informação (AI) da interface de leitura de e-books proporcionada pelo software do Kindle III WiFi, sob a ótica dos quatro princípios fundamentais da AI para Web, definidos por Peter Morville e Louis Rosenfeld, identificados como: sistema de organização, sistema de navegação, sistema de rotulação e sistema de busca. A realização da pesquisa se deu mediante a aplicação de questionário on-line composto por variáveis abertas e fechadas, com usuários reais e potenciais do Kindle III WiFi. O público avaliado foi composto por docentes vinculados ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Informação da Universidade Federal da Paraíba (PPGCI/UFPB), e discentes dos cursos de Graduação em Bacharelado em Arquivologia e Biblioteconomia da mesma instituição. A análise das questões objetivas se deu mediante utilização de um software empregado em pesquisas para coletar informações, denominado Encuestafacil.com. A análise das questões subjetivas por sua vez, se deu mediante o uso da Categorização , que é uma das etapas da técnica de análise de conteúdo. Com os resultados, foi possível identificar falhas na Arquitetura da Informação da interface de leitura de e-books proporcionada pelo software do Kindle III WiFi, sobretudo nos sistemas de organização e rotulação. Contudo, pontos positivos também podem ser elencados, uma vez que, a referida interface atende a alguns dos critérios definidos por Morville e Rosenfeld, dentre outros autores, como sendo de qualidade em uma interface que contemple os princípios de Arquitetura da Informação. Os resultados do estudo são fortes indicativos de que muito se precisa avançar na concepção de melhores interfaces, evidenciando assim, a necessidade de maiores estudos que abordem a AI em software leitor de e-books.

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