The study of consumer behavior of Thai e-book reader

With the fast growing trend of digital consumption in Thailand, we expect to see the strong growth in e-book industry in these next coming years. The current market share of e-book Thailand is taken by one leading e-bookstore, Ookbee, which accounts for up to 88% of e-book market. However, the market share of e-book itself is less than 2% from the total market share of Thailand’s consumer and educational book which has value of $1.13 billion. Comparing with a matured market such as US, e-book can take up to 13% share of publishing market. This leads to a huge gap for business development and opportunities in the foreseeable future. This research aims to provide consumer insight towards Thai e-book industry. The research objectives are to understand usage and attitude of Thai e-book readers and evaluate their attitude toward current Thai e-bookstores. In-depth interviews with 3 respondents and Questionnaire surveys with 204 respondents were conducted using convenience sampling method. According to the findings, we found that users read e-book less than print book significantly, except for the heavy readers of magazine. The key criteria for purchasing a book are content and cover page. It shows that more than 50% of respondents see the benefits of e-books as more convenient in terms of online purchase, easy access, and integrated with their existing devices. However, they also agree with the drawback of hurting their eyes if they read it for a long time. And most respondents strongly agree that there are no much choices of Thai e-book available in the market right now. The beliefs about e-book has benefit of paperless, and more convenient plays an important role in purchase intention. For the evaluation of current e-bookstores in Thailand, Ookbee has the highest brand awareness, past purchase rate, and current purchase rate. MEB and HyTexts have higher success rate of conversion rate along the brand funnel though their current brand awareness is quite low. Sales promotion is the key driven of brand awareness while the choice of book offering and value added features contribute to the customer retention.