In a time of economic turmoil and financial crisis profitability matters rise higher and higher on company agendas. Many companies are pressured to find profitability to avoid layoffs or even bankruptcy. Profitability essentially depends on the margin on the product or service sold and the costs associated with selling these products or services and hence these areas are of vital importance if companies are to improve profitability. Previous research has focused, for the most part, on product profitability while customer profitability has received less attention. This study is based on a case study of a Swedish publishing house and aims to investigate how the company?s Cost-to-Serve varies between its distribution channels.

The debate in the media on a new Swedish sex education movie sparked our interest in this study. The twenty-eight minutes long movie ?Sex on the map? is the first of it?s kind in twenty-five years. It is also part of a bigger sex educational project that contains, apart from the movie, a book about sex education, a documentary and a teachers guide. The project is a co-production between the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company (UR) and the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU).We were interested in how teachers received information about the project, and what their attitudes were towards it.

I FORM is the biggest health magazine of Scandinavia. It is a magazine that treats subjects like health food, training, sports gear, sex and relationships. The magazine addresses women directly and only women appear in the magazine.This is a study on how I FORM portrays women in their segment called ?Addicted to? (Biten av). It is a study of what kind of stereotypes that are used and also what kind of pictures that has been used to portrait the women.

Children of today are surrounded by many different kinds of media. Books have to compete with new media like computers, video games, many TV-channels etc. The aim of this study has been to investigate the reading habits of 9-12-year old boys in their spare time, and their reasons for reading related to their use of other media. Our interest has been to shed light on the boys reading habits, their preferences and motives for reading and their reading functions. Even though our focus has been on their reading, we also have examined their use of other media and the function of this use.

The aim of this thesis is to examine how secondary teachers in the subject of history are using the textbook in their teaching. Four questions are being dealt with in this thesis. What importance is being placed on the use of history textbooks by the secondary teachers? What priorities do the secondary teachers have? How do they deal with student interests? And what is the importance of the secondary teachers? work experience? I have interviewed four secondary teachers with different work experience to complete this thesis. A Dictaphone has been used in all the interviews. Research has shown that textbooks now have a central role in teaching and the lack of alternative materials and reduction of teaching hours has made it difficult to replace. The main conclusions of the thesis are that the history textbook has a dual role depending on the teacher you ask, and that the history book is used differently by the teachers.

AbstractBackground: When an acute illness or trauma occurs, life becomes disorganised and shattered for the critically ill person and his/her family members. The family members are confronted with thoughts about life and death which can cause stress and anxiety. How the family members cope with the crisis is individual and depending on personality and earlier experiences. Aim: The purpose of this literary review was to illustrate the family members´ experiences when dealing with a critically ill family member. Method: A literary review was made based on fifteen qualitative and quantitative scientific articles and a literary book.

In this essay there will be four text books from grade 1 studied, the first one are from the year 1976 and it will be going forward to the year 2012. The aim of this study is to see how the genders are depicted and represented, as well as what roles the genders are given. I do also want to see if there is a notable change in this over time. I will be doing a study based on the quantity of the contents, and I will also be doing a critical discourse analysis.The result of the study showed that there were more gender-based constructions that referred to women in all of the four books, which indicates that women are represented more often in these reading books. It is most common to portray the genders in their stereotypical roles, which again are present in society, but sometimes these roles are depart from what?s present in society.

Syftet med examensarbetet är främst att undersöka hur genus framställs i barnlitteratur samt fokusera på bibliotekariens roll i samband med utlåning av barnböcker till förskolan och vårdnadshavare. Som förskollärare ser vi boken som ett pedagogiskt redskap och som ett stöd i ett genusarbete. Vi har erfarenheter av att boken har ett stort användningsområde och de flesta böcker lånas via biblioteket. Därför ser vi att bibliotekarien har en viktig roll för förskolan i deras bokutbud. LpFö98 tar upp genusarbetet som en del av verksamheten, vi anser att det är vår skyldighet att ha kunskap om genus och dess betydelse för kommande generationer.

This master thesis deals with events, dynamics and problems of mediated information seeking within the context of a new information service called "Book a librarian". The study, based on a survey and interviews both in academic and public libraries and participant observations in academic libraries, has its theoretical base in the cognitive theory of information retrieval interaction. The cognitive view is used to throw light upon the need of an ongoing dialogue during the session in order to detect the information needs of the user and to conduct a successful retrieval of information. The communicative interaction is seen as threepart interaction between the intermediary, the user and the information system, where the current cognitive states of all three participants are involved. The study shows that the cognitive obstacles for a successful mediation and information retrieval are mostly connected to participants current knowledge of the subject and of the retrieval techniques.

The aim of our study is to gain understanding of how parentsperceive their own, the preschool's, and the library's efforts to stimulate preschoolers' enjoyment and yearning to read, as well as what types of collaborative efforts the parents seek.The study is based upon qualitative interviews with parents, both mothers and fathers, to preschool children (aged 1.5 to 6 years old). The analysis does not offer any generalizations. We have chosen to use a sociocultural perspective as the theoretical starting-point of our study, our thoughts being that we learn together with and by the help of others. We consider this perspective to be closely related to Aidan Chambers's "The Reading Circle", which we have chosen to use as our tool of analysis.It turned out that the parents perceived their own reading stimulating role as crucial, even if they did not consider all they did as reading stimulative. Some things, such as discussing the book while reading, occurred naturally but is also an important part to stimulate reading.

This master thesis is about access to literature translated into Swedish sign language for deaf at the public libraries. It is by now a well-known fact that there is produced very little literature in sign language for deaf. This is so even though the policies for the library nationally and internationally, and the public law for libraries in Sweden says there should be literature available for all groups of disadvantaged people. People who have problem reading ordinary ink books have the right to get the book adapted into a medium accessible for them. The goal of the Swedish law for disadvantaged says that in 2010 Sweden should be accessible for all irrespective of weather you are deaf or not.

The aim of this qualitative study is to examine how users of talking books perceive the possibility of downloading talking books from home without visiting the library and how this affects them. Three research questions were formulated:How do talking book users reflect on their library usage?Have the subject's' library usage changed since introduction to the download service?How have users experienced the service?To answer these questions, five semi structured interviews were conducted with five different users of talking books in Sweden. All subjects were currently using download services which they had gained access to from their local public libraries. In analyzing the interviews, a theory established by Henrik Jochumsen and Casper Hvenegaard Rasmussen in Gør biblioteket en forskel (2000) was used.

This thesis is about the bookmobile service in Sweden of today. The purpose is to examine how the staff motivate the existence of the bookmobile. Other purposes are to study the goals of the service, to describe ?daily life? of the bookmobile, examine the changes of the service during the years and discuss possible changes in the future. The study is based on interviews with thirteen staff members from six Swedish communities, of both rural and urban character.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to describe and compare the debates regarding the public funded publishing company En bok för alla (EBFA). On two occasions, 1992 and 2007, the public funding was threatened, which lead to debates and protests. The funding was revoked in 2007. I want to examine if by studying a particular product of cultural policy, one can se tendencies to how the cultural policy in whole change over time.

Trough the analyses of three young contemporary Swedish and Norwegian poets, who all in one way or another work with the language as material, I will circulate around the term language materialism. Each poet has his or her specific distinctive feature wich makes them three completely different poets. But they are all challenging the borders of literature and even the grammatical laws of language. Apart from the analyses I sketch an historical line between the predecessors of the experiments with the poetic language in the past, starting with Mallarmé, and the experiments of today. My essay will in conclusion discuss the language poetry in a wider philosophical point of view, connected to Derrida and Wittgenstein.The first analysis introduces the author and artist Johannes Heldén through his debute poetry collection Burner.