Website Content Evaluation Instrument for Adoption of Digital Publishing Innovations

Digital publishing is currently a major area of growth in the publishing sector of the global economy and
publishers, in realization of this development, are increasingly going digital, and going digital entails
adopting at least some of the innovations necessary for profitable business. To understand which innovations
that are adopted by pioneer e-publishers to assess them for possible adoption, scholars and publishers,
especially those based in developing economies would need reliable website evaluation instruments, but most
instruments available for website analysis are not focused on publishing. This gap, therefore, needs to be
filled with instruments specifically targeted at publishing sites. This study reports the development procedure
for a web evaluation instrument targeting publishing-specific websites. The 34-item instrument measures five
aspects of digital publishing: digital book format, e-promotion, e-commerce, e-collaboration and esocialization.
A total of 79 websites were observed and the proposed instrument was used to collect data to
examine level or extent of implementation of digital publishing. The results indicate that the instrument is
reliable. It is, therefore, concluded that the instrument will be useful to media scholars and publishers.