Page 196 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

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196 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

Using this model and the vocabularies to integrate data from 14 titles of typical ancient book
catalogs, including historical catalogs, official catalogs, private catalogs, large modern joint
catalogs and Shanghai Library’s ancient book database, the platform realizes key functions for
evidence-based research of ancient books. The functions include the search of the versions and
classification of ancient books, the clustering and comparing of different versions or copies of an
ancient book, the relations of authors and contributors, and the statistical analysis of ancient books
with a given time period, area and topic. By the construction of “Chinese Ancient Book Union
Catalog Platform for Evidence-based Research”, the availability, flexibility and scalability of the
data model has been verified. The paper also puts forward the problems that need to be further
resolved, such as the identification of a “Work”, the establishment of the relationships between the
“Instances”, the extraction of structured and fine-grained data from the content of ancient books,
and so on.

The effects of perceived value on users’ satisfaction and loyalty towards e-book
reading applications

〇a*
LI Wu〇
E-book applications, such as iReader and QQ Reader, have become main reading tools among
users in recent years. Despite increasing research attention to digital reading and E-book
applications, published literature on this topic primarily focused on the industry development and
product features, while few studies addressed the issue of usage and evaluation by readers. The
purpose of the present study is, based on the concept of perceived value within a user-centered
perspective, to examine the key factors contributing to users’ satisfaction and loyalty towards
E-book applications.
Drawing upon PERVAL, a four-dimension measuring scale widely used to assess users’
perceptions of the value of a certain product/service, this study firstly divided the construct of
perceived value into five sub-dimensions, which took the particularity of E-book applications into
consideration. The five sub-dimensions were social value, price value, content value, interaction
value, and interface design value respectively, among which the last three dimensions were from
the original dimension of quality/performance value in PERVAL.
A large-sample questionnaire survey was conducted in October, 2016, with the target population
being adult users of E-book applications. Structural equation modeling was adopted to investigate
the hypothesized relationships. Results indicated that users’ loyalty was positively related to their
satisfaction and that the different perceived value dimensions exerted different influences on
users’ satisfaction and loyalty. Specifically, the perceived interactive value had a significantly yet

* Correspondence should be addressed to LI Wu, Email: lowie@sina.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-1633-2363