Computer Book Market Continues Upward Trend

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the state of the computer book market, and its possible significance as a technology trend indicator. I predicted that we'd start to see an upturn as the year progressed. Based on the latest week's data, the upturn appears to have begun.  

The weekly trend for the Nielsen Bookscan Top 3000 computer books report has begun to pull ahead of last year (after three years of consecutive 20% year-on-year declines). This is the first period since we've been tracking these numbers that we've seen year-on-year numbers ahead of the prior year. (The Bookscan Top 3000 Computer Books report tracks point of sale data from Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon, and other major retailers.)

I had predicted an upturn based on the coming release of Photoshop CS and Mac OS X Tiger. However, at least for this week, the sales increase has been broad, across nearly the entire market. The figure below shows a treemap view of the week-on-week change as of the week of May 1, 2005. Categories in green increased unit sales over the prior week; categories in red decreased in sales.