Chinese humanities scholars' reading of academic E‐books: A survey on reading strategies and tasks

Abstract Academic books are essential to humanities scholars. With the rapid development of digital publishing, digital reading has become mainstream, and electronic academic books are gradually being absorbed by humanities scholars. In this case, it is important to understand their use of reading tasks and strategies when reading electronic‐academic books, and to summarize the characteristics of their e‐book reading behaviour. This study therefore outlined the academic reading characteristics of humanities scholars, as well as their e‐book reading strategies and tasks. Subsequently, a user reading strategy questionnaire was compiled, and a survey conducted. Finally, descriptive statistics and sample paired t ‐tests were adopted to obtain the usage of e‐book reading strategies of Chinese humanities scholars. Results showed that prior knowledge was the most used strategy, followed by understanding and decision‐making, self‐regulation, and self‐monitoring strategies. Significant differences in the frequency and preference of reading strategies in different e‐book reading tasks were also identified. This paper further discusses the characteristics of e‐book reading behaviour of humanities scholars, and the future direction of electronic academic book construction.