Contextual advertising

Contextual advertising entails the display of relevant ads based on the content that consumers view, exploiting the potential that consumers' content preferences are indicative of their product preferences. This paper studies the strategic aspects of such advertising, considering an intermediary who has access to a content base, sells advertising space to advertisers who compete in the product market, and provides the targeting technology. The results show that contextual targeting impacts advertiser profit in two ways: First, advertising through relevant content topics helps advertisers reach consumers with a strong preference for their product. Second, heterogeneity in consumers' content preferences can be leveraged to reduce product market competition, especially when competition is intense. The intermediary has incentives to strategically design its targeting technology, sometimes at the cost of the advertisers. When product market competition is moderate, the intermediary offers accurate targeting such that the consumers see the most relevant ads. When competition is high, the intermediary lowers the targeting accuracy such that the consumers see less relevant ads. Doing so intensifies competition and encourages advertisers to bid for multiple content topics in order to prevent their competitors from reaching consumers. In some cases, this may lead to an asymmetric equilibrium where one advertiser bids high even for the content topic that is more relevant to its competitor. © 2012 INFORMS

The Lean Bookstore

The bookstore industry has been changing in recent years with the growing popularity of e-books and self-publishing. The publishing houses are losing their grip on the industry because a greater portion of books are being sold by companies who don’t need to sell books to stay afloat, and overproduction is rampant, with 40% of all printed books being pulped. Bookstores have been suffering because of the high costs associated with the current value stream. E-books aimed to reduce these costs but have been cannibalizing their print counterpart and do not generate enough revenue to offset the loss of print sales. That being said, demand for books has not decreased in recent years and physical books purchased in bookstores are still the most common form of purchased literature. For the sake of consumers and the industry as a whole, there is a clear need for change. “The Lean Bookstore” seeks to change the way books are sold by creating a new kind of bookstore that leverages point-of-sale printing and a simpler value stream to bring customers the best combination of price, selection, and customer service on any book, at any time. Currently, online is cheaper but you must wait; in store you can browse but you’ll pay more; online has better selection but is difficult to browse; independents might have better service but less selection. Customers won’t have to compromise anymore as all of these strengths are brought under one roof. Through developing and analyzing four different bookstore models, the airport bookstore has the greatest potential because it reaches the largest market and has the most compelling value propositions. Our business is different from current airport bookstores because we have increased our selection of books by storing all of them digitally, reduced transportation and inventory costs, and will be able to provide better service through our reduced store footprint

Browsing and searching e-encyclopaedias

Educational websites and electronic encyclopaedias employ many of the same design elements, such as hyperlinks, frames and search mechanisms. This paper asks to what extent recommendations from the world of web design can be applied to e-encyclopaedias, through an evaluation of users' browsing and searching behaviour in the free, web-based versions of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Concise Columbia Encyclopaedia and Microsoft's Encarta. It is discovered that e-encyclopaedias have a unique set of design requirements, as users' expectations are inherited from the worlds of both web and print

Brookes Library online: a guide for Education students

A guide to Library resources available online, including login procedure, e-books, e-journals and database searching, plus troubleshooting tips. Targeted at Education students so using education-related examples, but could be used by other groups with minor adaptations

DSpace How-To Guide: Tips and tricks for managing common DSpace chores

PDF fileThis short booklet is intended to introduce the commonest non-obvious customization related tasks for newcomers to DSpace administration. It has been written against the current stable version 1.3.2 of DSpace. We have tried to include instructions for different operating systems as required; most customizations, however, work identically cross-platform