Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the following four influential factors on flow in digital reading: contents, platforms, motivations, and places. The contents factor was subdivided into “news articles” and “journal papers”; platforms is comprised of “mobile phones,” “tablets,” and “laptops”; motivations consists of “pleasure” and “assignments”; and “home,” “on the go,” and “out of home” are the subdivisions of the places factor. We conducted a questionnaire survey with the study’s participants and the following results are shown: 1) The flow during the reading of news articles is influenced by motivations, whereas the flow during the reading of journal papers is influenced by platforms. 2) Regarding mobile phones, motivations significantly affected the flow, whereas content types significantly affected the flow for tablets; also, laptops provided the best flow and articles can be read on the platform regardless of motivations. 3) Reading for pleasure rather than for assignments positively influenced the flow for all of the platforms. 4) With respect to news articles, the places providing flow are different across platforms. However, for journal papers, the places out of home provided good flow. For tablets, the places for flow significantly depended on the content type, which is not the case for laptops.