State of the Computer Book Market - Mid-Year 2009

If you have read previous State of the Computer Book Market posts, you know we typically publish between 3-5 posts that summarize the computer book market for a given year. SInce it's mid-year, I thought I'd do a shorter, one-post summary of where things stand in 2009 thus far. The picture looks like our US economy: lots of bad news peppered with small glimmers of hope. So let's look at the Market, Categories, Publishers, and Languages.

The market has been on a steady decline since mid-2008 and has continued downward right through the first half of 2009. And there are very few signs that the book-buying slump is going to turn around anytime soon. Overall, the market saw 595,821 fewer units sold in the first half of 2009 than were sold in the same period of 2008. Although we do not have data to show the trends between 2000 and 2003, the market performance this year is the worst we've seen since the fall of of 2001. You'll notice in the chart below that the seasonal patterns have remained consistent, but sales are at a much lower volume than any previous year.

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State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 5 -- eBooks and Summary

In this final post, 1, 2, 3, and 4 were posted earlier, I will provide a summary of the first four posts, provide some insight into a view of top Authors, and include some data on electronic books and how the digital world is catching up to the print world.

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State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4 -- The Languages

In this fourth post (parts one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall the market for programming languages was down 5.9% in 2008 when compared with 2007. There were 1,849,974 units sold in 2007 versus 1,740,808 units sold in 2008, which is a decrease of 109,166  units. So the unhealthy 8% loss in the Overall Computer Book Market was not completely fueled by programming-oriented books.

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State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 3: The Publishers

In this third installment, (see part one and part two; part four to come later this week), we will look at how Publishers fared in 2007 when compared to 2006. The chart below shows our dashboard view of the Large publishers’ results for 2007. The most notable factor is that Wiley continues to hold the leading spot as the largest publisher, with 30% market share of units sold, while Pearson lost 2% market share and O'Reilly gains 1%. (We’ll look at revenue share later in the analysis.)

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State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 2: The Technologies

In this second installment (the first post is found here), we look at computer book sales in specific technology categories. Remember that we've organized the data into six "Category Families" -- Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Other. Within each Family are category group, super-category, category, and atomic category, in a five-level hierarchy. For example, Systems and Programming includes programming languages, databases, software engineering, general programming, security, and so on. In the rest of this post, we will contrast Q4 2007 with Q4 2008 and the whole year of 2007 with 2008.

As a refresher, here is a new treemap of the Category Families with their sub areas for Q4 2008 compared to Q4 2007. In this view, we've changed the thickness of the borders to highlight the category hierarchy.

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State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 1: The Market

As described in Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, and our other posts on the State of the Computer Book Market we have an updated series of posts that show the whole market's final 2008 numbers. Remember this data is from Bookscan's weekly top 3,000 titles sold. Bookscan measures actual cash register sales in bookstores. Simply put, if you buy a book in the United States, there's a high probability it will get recorded in this data. Retailers such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon make up the lion's share of these sales.

Book Market Performance

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State of the Computer Book Market, Part 4 - The Languages

Note: An inadvertent draft of this post went out in our RSS feed and was posted for about an hour on Tuesday. It was cloned from Q1 '07 and most of the data and information was wrong.

In this fourth post (one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall the 2007 market for programming languages was down (1.67%) in 2007 when compared with 2006. There were 1,809,695 units sold in 2006 versus 1,779,523 units sold in 2007 which is (30,172) fewer units in 2007. So the modest 1% growth in the Overall Computer Book Market must have been fueled by non-programming oriented books. You don't need a programming language to learn to use MacOsX, Vista or Office and that is where the growth was in 2007.

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State of the Computer Book Market, part 3 -- The Publishers

In this third installment, (part one, part two and part four later this week), we will look at how Publishers fared in 2007 when compared to 2006. The chart below shows our dashboard view of the Large publishers' results for 2007. The most notable change is that Wiley has assumed the leading spot as the largest publisher, with 29% market share of units sold. (We'll look at revenue share later in the analysis.)

2006 Pub Share	2007 Pub Share

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State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2: The Technologies

In this second installment (the first post is found here), we look at computer book sales in specific technology categories. Remember that we've organized the data into six "Category Families" -- Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Other. Within each Family are category group, super-category, category, and atomic category, in a five-level hierarchy. For example, Systems and Programming includes programming languages, databases, software engineering, general programming, security, and so on. In the rest of this post, we will contrast Q4 2006 with Q4 2007 and the whole year of 2006 with 2007.

As a refresher, here is a new view of the Category Families with their sub areas for Q4 2007 compared to Q4 2006. In this view, we've changed the thickness of the borders to highlight the category hierarchy.

Recapping the big picture from the last post, what you didn't see is that the fast growth of Windows Vista was aided by the addition of 63 new titles [title count] that made the Bookscan data-set in 2007. (The data set consists of the top 10,000 computer books. So more titles in a given category typically means that new titles in that category have pushed titles from other categories off the bottom of the list. Shrinkage in the title count in a category doesn't necessarily mean that titles are unavailable, just that they are no longer selling enough copies to make the list.)

There were 15 Vista titles in the 2006 data and on 12/31/07 there were 78 or an 420% increase in count, while XP declined at a slower rate going from 125 titles in 2006 to 97 in 2007 for a -22.4% decrease in count. Combined, that netted 35 more titles in 2007 than in 2006 for XP and Vista. This is a distinct (isbn) count as well, so if a title makes it in the top 10,000 report for more than one week, it is counted only once. We wanted to see how many titles made up the category, not how often a title makes the report. But there is more to this category than is visibly apparent and we will cover that in more detail later in this post.

In the table immediately below, you can see how the cat_family groupings have performed (total units) both by quarter and yearly results. The only noticeable change is that the Consumer Operating Systems has swapped positions with Digital Media at the number 4 & 5 ranks.

Technorati Tags: Analysis, Books, Data, Markets, O'Reilly Media, Publishing, Trends

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State of the Computer Book Market, Part 1: The Market

As described in the post Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, and our other posts on the State of the Computer Book Market we have an updated series of posts that show the whole market's final 2007 numbers. Remember this data is from Bookscan's weekly top 3,000 titles sold. Bookscan measures actual cash register sales in bookstores. In other words, if you buy a book it gets recorded in this data. Retailers such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon make up the lion's share of these sales.

Book Market Performance

Here's the year-on-year trend for the entire computer book market since 2003, when we first obtained the data from Bookscan. Please remember the data is for all publishers and NOT just O'Reilly. The slightly-thicker red line represents the 2007 data.

Click on the image to get a larger view.

As you can see, the clear seasonal pattern we've pointed out before still exists. The trend line for each year closely mirrors the year before, with remarkably consistent weekly ups and downs. (The computer book market cratered in 2001, shrinking twenty percent a year for three years until it stabilized in 2004 at about half the size that it was in 2000. We only have data going back to 2003.)

So what's was news in 2007? The year got off to slow start and by mid-year it looked like results were going end below the prior years. But around the middle of July, which is typically a slow time in computer books, the market climbed above the most recent years. Not only did the market climb above of the prior years, but it did not dip below any of the prior years until the third week in December [Christmas week]. That being said, the market ended up at 1%, or 4,089 units above 2006 - on a base of over 7.4 million units. That is truly a small increase but mostly realized in the second half of the year.

Another way to look at the market is with our Treemap visualization tool. This tool helps us pick up on trends quickly, even when looking at thousands of books. It works like this.

The size of a square shows the market share and relative-size of a category, while the color shows the rate of change. Red is down, and green is up, with the intensity of the color representing the magnitude of the change. The following screenshot of our treemap shows gains and losses by category, comparing the fourth quarter of 2007 with the fourth quarter of 2006.

Technorati Tags: Analysis, Books, Data, Markets, O'Reilly Media, Publishing, Trends

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A Year in O'Reilly Books (2007)

I was looking the other day at our internal sales reports, and thought I'd offer a few random reflections based on our changing mix of bestsellers. This is anecdotal data, and for O'Reilly books only, not to be confused with my State of the Computer Book Market posts. (Mike Hendrickson and I are working on one of those as well.) Nor is this a complete list of our bestsellers. It's a list of books that say something to me about the changing mix of needs and interests among our customers.

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition. Published just before the holidays, this book sold out of its 50,000 copy first printing in a matter of days. It's topped the Bookscan bestseller lists (which are based on point-of-sale reports from more than 60% of US bookstores) since it appeared. This is not news, as every new edition of this book has managed the same feat. But what really struck me this time was how much distance it put between itself and the top book on Windows (Windows Vista for Dummies.)

Shortly after Vista for Dummies was released, it hit a peak of about 1250 copies a week. By contrast, Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition, hit a peak of almost 4500 copies a week. To be sure, the Leopard peak was right before Christmas, while the Vista initial sales peak was back in March, so there's some inflation of the Mac OS X numbers by holiday buying. But it still says something about how much the market has changed. In the fourth quarter of 2007, the total size of the market for books on Mac operating systems was about 60% the size of the market for books on Windows! What's more, Switching to the Mac, Tiger Edition saw its sales increase steadily all year, which is very unusual for a two year old book.

iPhone: The Missing Manual. Ok. Duh. But it's worth noting that this is the first time a book on a phone has been a top computer book bestseller. The only other handheld computer of any kind to generate bestselling books was the original PalmPilot. I've written previously about why the iPhone is not just a breakthrough phone but a breakthrough computing device, to previous phones as Excel was to Lotus 1-2-3. We really are on the edge of a new ambient computing paradigm that will end the personal computer era even more convincingly than the internet itself did.

Essential Actionscript 3.0 and Programming Flex 2. A lot of people have missed just how much Flash is on a roll. Ajax books have slowed down considerably, while books on Macromedia's Adobe's web technologies are really moving. (Adobe's domination of the photo market needs no special callout. Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual and Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual were both among our top sellers for the year, along with Photoshop CS3 One on One.)

I noted that the AJAX meme seems to be waning, but that doesn't mean that the underlying technologies of AJAX are suffering. Javascript: The Definitive Guide continues to be one of our all time bestsellers. While a host of languages battle it out on the server side, Javascript (and its cousin Actionscript) dominate client side programming.

For what it's worth, I continue to be bemused by the failure of the open source community to embrace Javascript as one of its greatest successes. You rarely hear it mentioned in the same breath as other iconic open source projects.

I remember back when SOAP, UDDI and all the rest of the corporate web services stack was introduced, many people in the open source community saw it as an attempt to recapture the web, making it complex enough to be an enterprise software play. But those complex stacks never caught on. Adam Trachtenberg's cover quote says it all: "RESTful Web Services ... provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it."

A recent Evans Data study found that 75% of developers are self-taught or learned on the job. As the industry matures, developers are looking to increase their insight and their skills, not just pick up the latest technology. Beautiful Code, a collection of essays by master programmers about how they solved particularly hard problems, must have hit a nerve. It was our #9 bestselling title for the year, and the number one software engineering title industry-wide according to our analysis of Bookscan figures.

I've argued for years that the secret sauce of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, one way or the other. Algorithmic interpretation of aggregated human interaction is one key technique. The various algorithms involved overlap heavily with the field of machine learning, but we preferred to title our book on the subject Programming Collective Intelligence. It was one of our sleeper titles for the year. Brick and mortar stores still don't know what to do with it because, like many breakthrough titles, it is the start of a new category rather than one more entry into an existing one.

I was probably most surprised when I saw Programming WCF Services on our list of top performing books for the year. If you're steeped in open source, you might never have heard of Windows Communications Foundation, Microsoft's approach to building SOA applications on Windows. And you might not care. But you'd be making a mistake. Don't count Microsoft out of the Web services game yet! They still have a brilliant, passionate developer community, and as a company have tremendous resources, persistence, and talent. And now that they have real competition, I expect them to reinvent themselves. (For that matter, Head First C# was the top selling programming language title in Bookscan last week, except for Javascript: The Definitive Guide. And C# continues to gain significantly on Java in terms of book sales.)

Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul wasn't one of our bestsellers last year, but I believe it was one of our most important and thought-provoking books. (It was also one of Amazon's top picks for the year, along with Beautiful Code.) Like its 1995 predecessor, The Future Does Not Compute, it is a contrarian book, which challenges our assumptions about the technological future, and urges us to value what distinguishes us from our machines.

I wrote recently in a different context that "Figuring out the right balance of man and machine is one of the great challenges of our time. We're increasingly building complex systems that involve both, but in what proportion?" Steve has a unique take on this problem, far from the cutting edge of Web 2.0. He argues that in adapting ourselves to computers, we may be ignoring essential parts of ourselves that don't fit the computational paradigm.

As a former classicist, I can't help loving Steve's opening trope, which tells the story of Odysseus' deceit of the Cyclops in his cave. He then takes the very term "technology" back to its Greek roots, with a meditation on the double meaning of the terms "techne" and "mechane":

I'd like you to think for a moment of the various words we use to designate technological products. You will notice that a number of these words have a curious double aspect: they, or their cognate forms, can refer either to external objects we make, or to certain inner activities of the maker. A "device," for example, can be an objective, invented thing, but it can also be some sort of scheming or contriving of the mind, as when a defendant uses every device he can think of to escape the charges against him. The word "contrivance" shows the same two-sidedness, embracing both mechanical appliances and the carefully devised plans and schemes we concoct in thought. As for "mechanisms" and "machines," we produce them as visible objects out there in the world even as we conceal our own machinations within ourselves. Likewise, an "artifice" is a manufactured device, or else it is trickery, ingenuity, or inventiveness. "Craft" can refer to manual dexterity in making things and to a ship or aircraft, but a "crafty" person is adept at deceiving others.

This odd association between technology and deceit occurs not only in our own language, but even more so in Homer's Greek, where it is much harder to separate the inner and outer meanings, and the deceit often reads like an admired virtue. The Greek techne, from which our own word "technology" derives, meant "craft, skill, cunning, art, or device"—all referring without discrimination to what we would call either an objective construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver.

If there's one book on this list that you read that you would have otherwise have missed, make it this one. Or you can follow Steve's meditations on man and machine on his netfuture mailing list. But I digress.

What's notably missing from the bestseller lists: books on programming languages (besides Javascript). The top programming language books in last week's bookscan report were Learning Python, followed closely by the just-released Head First C#. Books on Java, Perl, PHP, and yes, even Ruby, are well down the list. Books on Linux, MySQL, and security ditto. In the professional computer area, networking, software engineering, and database books that weren't specific to any particular database product were the overall winners. (More on that when Mike and I get to "The State of the Computer Book Market.") It seems to me that increasingly, professionals are going online to find many types of content that they used to find in books.

Tell me: what books made you pay attention in 2007? You may not have access to sales figures, but you know what matters to you. What books did you find most useful? (Not just ours, but from any competitor.) For that matter, what online resources did you find useful instead of books? What woke you up, and made you think "wow, it's a whole new world?"

State of the Computer Book Market, Part Four - Programming Languages Q1 07

In this fourth post [one, two and three are found here] on the State of the Computer Book Market, I will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

A Treemap view of the Programming Languages

Overall the Q1 '07 market for programming languages was down (9.10%) when compared with Q1 '06. There were 482,079 units sold in Q1 '06 versus 441,850 units sold in Q1 '07.

In the treemap view below, you will notice a couple of bright green areas -- namely Ruby and Transact SQL. JavaScript and Python, which are also green [not bright green] show a nice growth when compared to the Q1 '06 timeframe. Actionscript, VBScript and .Net Languages are the other languages showing growth in Q1 '07. The rest of the languages were either flat or down.

Before I begin to drill in on the languages, I thought it would be best to explain our "language dimension." Our view on languages is not just strictly about programming with a particular language, although we capture those very easily, but that the book being categorized has code examples in a particular language. So Flash Programming with Java would be in our Flash atomic category, but the language dimension would be Java. Similarly, our Head First Design Patterns book contains all examples written in Java, so it too carries the "java" tag on the language dimension. So with this language dimension information in mind, I am going to add one more grouping before we dive in. For the sake of grouping and presenting this information in a more readable format, I have classified the categories for the languages in this way:

Now let's dive into this treemap and take a closer look at the languages. The tables that I am showing will contain the following header:

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State of the Computer Book Market, Part 3 - The Publishers

In this third installment, (part one, part two and part four later this week), we will look at how Publishers fared in the first quarter of 2007. The chart below shows our dashboard view of the Large publishers' results for Q1 '07. The most notable change is that Wiley (up 1%) has pulled into a tie with Pearson (down 2%) as the largest publishers, with 29% market share each.

Publisher Market Share - Q1 2007

One thing you'll notice is that you may not recognize the names of the top publishers, because they are actually conglomerates of many smaller publishing imprints that they've acquired or created over the years. The imprints are the familiar consumer-facing brands. For instance, when you purchase a book from Peachpit or Sams, you typically see Peachpit or Sams on the spine, not Pearson, even though Pearson owns both companies. So to get a better picture of who makes up which publisher conglomerates, we need to drill down on the "imprint."

So let's take a look inside of Pearson, Wiley, and O'Reilly and separate out their imprints. In the case of Pearson and Wiley, most of their imprints are wholly owned subsidiaries. In O'Reilly's case, all of our imprints other than "O'Reilly" and "Pogue Press" are actually distribution partners. What that means is that we are getting their books into bookstores for them. These next charts are drill-ins on the top three "publishers."

Pearson	Wiley

O'Reilly Media

Now that you have an idea of the imprints that make up the largest three publishers, let's throw all the imprints together and then look at their respective market share. The following chart shows the top 10 "imprints" and how they stack up against each other. From this imprint-view, you'll notice that O'Reilly is the second largest in market share only behind "Dummies."

Imprint Market Share - Top Ten Imprints

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State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2 - The Technologies

In this second installment (the first post is found here), I'll look at specific technologies and will drill in on the areas a bit more. Remember that we've organized the data into six "Category Families" -- Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Other. Within each Family are category group, super-category, category, and atomic category. For example, Systems and Programming includes programming languages, databases, software engineering, general programming, security, and so on.

As a refresher, here is a new view of the Category Families with their sub areas for Q1 2007 compared to Q1 2006. In this view, we've changed the view to highlight the category hierarchy rather than the relative size of the actual categories.

Recapping the big picture from last week, you can see that the moderate-to-high growth of Consumer Operating Systems has not been visibly aided by the addition of 47 new Q1 '07 Vista titles, because there were no Vista titles in '06 -- hence the black box for Vista. However, the whole Category Family (Consumer Operating Systems) benefits from 47 new titles with more than 86,000 Vista units sold in the first three months of this year. The Business Applications area has also been aided by the Office 2007 release and new titles coming into the category. The Web Design and Development area is showing steady sales for the most part, but is down collectively. Although Digital Media is our second largest category, its relative market growth during the quarter was slower than anticipated. But that is no surprise because Adobe has CS3 about to release and consumers are holding out for the new software. I expect this category to be one of the top performing areas in 2007. (That being said, early reports from some software stores suggest that, like Vista and Office 2007, CS3 may be a bit slower out of the gate than expected.)

Below are some individual charts from our dashboard showing a 24-month period from April 2005 to April 2007. By looking at a 24-month pattern, you'll get more insight into whether or not a particular area seems to be hit by seasonal factors, or if there is a steady decline/increase for the category.

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State of the Computer Book Market, Q107, part 1 - Overall Market

Tim has asked me to take over writing the quarterly report on the state of the computer book market.

As described in the post Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, our research group has built a MySQL datamart containing Bookscan's weekly top 10,000 titles sold. Bookscan measures actual cash register sales in bookstores to you, the individuals purchasing and reading the books. Retailers such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon make up the lion's share of these sales.

Book Market Performance

Here's the year-on-year trend for the entire computer book market since 2003, when we first obtained the data from Bookscan.

Click on the image to get a larger view.




As you can see, the clear seasonal pattern we've pointed out before still exists. The trend line for each year closely mirrors the year before, with remarkably consistent weekly ups and downs. (The computer book market cratered in 2001, shrinking twenty percent a year for three years until it stabilized in 2004 at about half the size that it was in 2000. We only have data going back to 2003. If we had pre-dotcom bust data, it would all be, to borrow a saying from Al Gore, "off-the-charts.") 2005 saw a slight upturn from what we viewed as the bottom of the market in 2004. 2006 got off to an even stronger start, and it looked as though we were recovering from the post-dotcom-bust slump. But by the second quarter of last year, we'd reverted to the norm for the past three years.

In the first quarter of 2006, new interest in web development associated with Web 2.0 and strong performance of books on digital media applications like Photoshop helped to drive the market. In the first quarter of 2007, we hoped that the Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 releases would cause a similar sharp increase in our trend lines. That has not materialized, and in fact, you could say that Microsoft's new releases have not lived up to expectations yet, at least for book sales. I did say "yet" because there are signs that Vista is starting to pick up steam. But the fact is that without a significant bump from Vista and related Office products, the 2007 market has not performed at the 2006 level. I find it very interesting that the web and digital media had more of a market effect in 2006 than a huge, highly anticipated release of a new version of the world's most used consumer operating system and its office productivity suite has in 2007. It's one more sign of the waning of Microsoft's once fearsome market power.

Comparing Quarters

In order to see what is spiking and deflating the trend line above, we use our Treemap visualization tool. This tool helps us pick up on trends quickly, even when looking at thousands of books. It works like this.

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State of the Computer Book Market, Part 3 - The Publishers

In this third installment, (part one, part two and part four later this week), we will look at how Publishers fared in the first quarter of 2007. The chart below shows our dashboard view of the Large publishers' results for Q1 '07. The most notable change is that Wiley (up 1%) has pulled into a tie with Pearson (down 2%) as the largest publishers, with 29% market share each.

Publisher Market Share - Q1 2007

One thing you'll notice is that you may not recognize the names of the top publishers, because they are actually conglomerates of many smaller publishing imprints that they've acquired or created over the years. The imprints are the familiar consumer-facing brands. For instance, when you purchase a book from Peachpit or Sams, you typically see Peachpit or Sams on the spine, not Pearson, even though Pearson owns both companies. So to get a better picture of who makes up which publisher conglomerates, we need to drill down on the "imprint."

So let's take a look inside of Pearson, Wiley, and O'Reilly and separate out their imprints. In the case of Pearson and Wiley, most of their imprints are wholly owned subsidiaries. In O'Reilly's case, all of our imprints other than "O'Reilly" and "Pogue Press" are actually distribution partners. What that means is that we are getting their books into bookstores for them. These next charts are drill-ins on the top three "publishers."

Pearson	Wiley

O'Reilly Media

Now that you have an idea of the imprints that make up the largest three publishers, let's throw all the imprints together and then look at their respective market share. The following chart shows the top 10 "imprints" and how they stack up against each other. From this imprint-view, you'll notice that O'Reilly is the second largest in market share only behind "Dummies."

Imprint Market Share - Top Ten Imprints

Technorati Tags: Analysis, Books, Data, Markets, Trends

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State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2 - The Technologies

In this second installment (the first post is found here), I'll look at specific technologies and will drill in on the areas a bit more. Remember that we've organized the data into six "Category Families" -- Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Other. Within each Family are category group, super-category, category, and atomic category. For example, Systems and Programming includes programming languages, databases, software engineering, general programming, security, and so on.

As a refresher, here is a new view of the Category Families with their sub areas for Q1 2007 compared to Q1 2006. In this view, we've changed the view to highlight the category hierarchy rather than the relative size of the actual categories.

Recapping the big picture from last week, you can see that the moderate-to-high growth of Consumer Operating Systems has not been visibly aided by the addition of 47 new Q1 '07 Vista titles, because there were no Vista titles in '06 -- hence the black box for Vista. However, the whole Category Family (Consumer Operating Systems) benefits from 47 new titles with more than 86,000 Vista units sold in the first three months of this year. The Business Applications area has also been aided by the Office 2007 release and new titles coming into the category. The Web Design and Development area is showing steady sales for the most part, but is down collectively. Although Digital Media is our second largest category, its relative market growth during the quarter was slower than anticipated. But that is no surprise because Adobe has CS3 about to release and consumers are holding out for the new software. I expect this category to be one of the top performing areas in 2007. (That being said, early reports from some software stores suggest that, like Vista and Office 2007, CS3 may be a bit slower out of the gate than expected.)

Below are some individual charts from our dashboard showing a 24-month period from April 2005 to April 2007. By looking at a 24-month pattern, you'll get more insight into whether or not a particular area seems to be hit by seasonal factors, or if there is a steady decline/increase for the category.

Technorati Tags: Analysis, Books, Data, Markets, Trends

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Data is the Intel Inside: One More Small Sign

I've long argued that one of the important changes that's part of Web 2.0 is that data is the "Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications. I've also remarked on Hal Varian's comment that SQL is the new HTML. But it was still a bit of a surprise to see this week's treemap visualization of Bookscan's point of sale data on computer book sales:

If you don't look at these treemaps every week, you might not notice anything significant. But as Roger Magoulas, our Director of Research, pointed out in his weekly summary: "Database is now the top left category, displacing programming languages, which has traditionally appeared in that position. This week, database sales (11,170 units), exceeded programming languages (11,109 units) for the first time, creating the change in layout. (The treemap algorithm places the largest items in the top left.)"

It was a small change -- database book sales up 1% for the week, programming language book sales down 1% -- but it was enough to change the layout. This might be only a minor weekly variance that will shortly reverse, or a tipping point, but I thought it was worth a note. Is it significant that in this one week, more books sold on databases than on programming languages? Maybe not. But it's certainly thought-provoking.

(Aside: That's one of the things I love about visualization tools -- they help you spot changes that you'd otherwise miss. These two categories are so nearly even -- a difference of less than half a percent -- that you'd never notice.)

For more information on our book data and visualization methodology, see Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, or my various State of the Computer Book Market postings.

State of the Computer Book Market, Q406, Part 2: Category Winners and Losers

Yesterday, I talked about the overall state of the computer book market. In this installment: category visualizations and trends showing which technologies are winning and which are losing in the book market. Here's a treemap view of the quarter on quarter differences between Q4 of 2006 and the same period last year:

As I've previously described in Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, in a Treemap visualization, the size of a square indicates the relative size of the category, and its color indicates the rate of change. A category that is bright green is up significantly. One that is bright red is heading strongly in the other direction. Colors that are more muted show smaller rates of change. For this image, I've also dragged a slider to show the enclosing category hierarchy, so only the top level categories are proportionally sized.

As you can see from the controls at the top of the display, we're showing quarter on quarter unit sales compared to the same period in the previous year. (Note: quarters are 13 week periods as closely aligned to calendar quarters as possible. Because Neilsen reports data weekly, and weeks don't match up exactly with quarters, we do a best fit.)

The entire market was down 4% in unit sales versus the same period a year ago, but a quick glance at the treemap shows where the biggest problem is: Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, down 18%, Business Applications, down 8%. As I wrote last week, we're assuming that the market is waiting for books on Vista, Office 7, and Mac OS X Leopard. However, much of the Professional Programming and Systems Administration super category is also down, albeit at a smaller 4%, and even Digital Media applications are showing an anemic 1% growth, despite the huge growth in the sales of books on the iPod. (But for that, even the digital media category would be down.) But once again, the market is awaiting new releases of Adobe products some time next year. Web Design and Development, up 7%, is the only top level category showing continued growth.

Let's now take a closer look at each of these top level categories.

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State of the Computer Book Market, Q4 06, Part 1, Overall Market Trend

As I try to do each quarter, here's a report on the state of the computer book market, as revealed by data from Nielsen Bookscan's top 3,000 Computer Books report. (See my entry Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator for a description of our methodology.)
 

Here's the year-on-year trend since 2003:

As you can see, the strong start to the year faded in the second half. In the first quarter, it really looked like we might be about to break out of the holding pattern we've seen for the past three years. The second quarter was a disappointment, but we had a brief resurgence in the third, which didn't stick. While the year as a whole ended with a 2% increase over the previous year, most of that increase happened in the first quarter. A chart showing the percentage week-on-week and cumulative difference highlights the issue:

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