State of the Computer Book Market - Mid-Year 2009

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 14

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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At Risk: Universal Online Access to All Knowledge

by Linda Stone | comments: 11

I’ve been following Brewster Kahle and Robert Darnton, a University Professor and director of Harvard’s Library, recently, and they’re concerned over the settlement of the lawsuit between Google and the authors and publishers, over the scanning and use of books in Google Book Search. In my experience, Brewster is extraordinarily thoughtful and takes a long view. Early in my career, I was a librarian. I love books. So while I’m not a lawyer and I find this settlement confusing, I’m writing about it because I think it merits awareness and a serious discussion.

The key issues appear to be whether the business model created by the settlement will lock up content that essentially belongs to the public domain (per Brewster) and whether the publishers’ and authors’ creation of a Google monopoly for books will harm access to knowledge in the future (per Darnton). Below, I’m relying on their words to explain this further.

Last week Brewster posted “It’s All About the Orphans” (http://www.opencontentalliance.org/2009/02/23/its-all-about-the-orphans/) on the blog of the Open Content Alliance, focusing on the plight of “orphan works” - that vast number of books that are still under copyright but whose authors can no longer be found:

"After digesting the proposed Google Book Settlement, it becomes clear that the dizzyingly complex agreement is, in essence, an elaborate scheme for the exploitation of orphan works… The upshot, if the Settlement is approved, would be legal protection for Google, and only for Google, to scan and provide digital access to the orphan works. Presto! … So, should the Settlement be approved, Google will be handed exclusive access to the orphans, and the public loses out… I, personally, am amazed at this creative use of class action law. The three parties have managed to skirt copyright law, bypass legislative efforts, and feather their own nests - all through the clever use of law intended to remedy harms. This Settlement, if approved by the judge, will accomplish things appropriate to a legislative body not to private corporate boardrooms. Let’s live under the rule of law, as arduous as that might be, and free the orphans, legitimately, not for one corporation but for all of us."

And in “Google & the Future of Books” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281), an article that Darnton published in The New York Review of Books last month, the focus is slightly different but the upshot is the same:

"After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese - one is likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the world's largest library… Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business - not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon… The class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition… We are allowing a question of public policy - the control of access to information - to be determined by private lawsuit… As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly - a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information… The settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company… This is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever."

A lot seems to be at stake and the court may approve the settlement in June! I don't care if the settlement means that Google will get even richer (disclosure: I’m a Google shareholder). The question is: to what extent will WE become poorer?

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

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 9

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.

Cat_Family	Qtr Growth	YoY Growth	06Rank	07Rank	06Share	07Share
business applications	11.78%	4.79%	2	2	15.85%	16.63%
computer topics / other	-3.09%	-2.74%	6	6	1.94%	1.99%
consumer operating systems	39.43%	25.47%	5	4	8.32%	11.15%
digital media	-13.79%	-19.35%	4	5	10.72%	8.97%
systems and programming	-6.76%	-5.48%	1	1	29.03%	27.48%
web design and development	-3.33%	-2.34%	3	3	14.38%	14.04%

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

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