A novel romance : conceptualising emotional attachment as a barrier to adoption

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) aims to understand consumers’ adoption of new technologies. Some 30 years after TAM was first proposed, it is still widely used today. This paper proposes an extended version of the TAM, with the primary addition to it being the construct of consumers’ emotional attachment to an existing product. The expanded TAM, Technology Acceptance Model with Emotional Attachment (TAME), is applied to the understudied area of e-book reader technology and its adoption by consumers who read for pleasure versus for academic purposes, as has been the focus of past research on e-book readers. The extended model considers consumers’ emotional attachment to paper books (pbooks) as a likely barrier to the take up of e-book reader technology.