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05.14.07

Mike Hendrickson

Mike Hendrickson

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
Market Q1 '07

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."

PearsonWiley
Pearson Imprints-2 Wiley Imprints-1

O'Reilly Media
Orm Imprints-1

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
Imprint3


Imprint Analysis by Category

Let's take a look at which categories each of the imprints publishes in and where their strengths lie. Dummies and O'Reilly appear to have the most diverse publishing programs as they are not at the bottom in any category. Dummies is clearly the leader in Business Apps and Consumer Operating Systems, while O'Reilly and Microsoft are neck and neck in the Systems and Programming category.

Publishers' Category Strength
Pub Q1 Cats

A note on Market Share versus Title Efficiency

A typical indicator of publisher performance is market share of units sold, which is what we've been looking at so far. Perhaps a better measure is how many titles published it takes to get a comparable share of unit sales. This is the ratio of title share to unit market share. Think about it this way: if a publisher has 15% of the titles appearing in the Bookscan Top 3000, and gets a 15% share of units sold, they will have a ratio of 1:1, expressed as a title efficiency of 1.0. A publisher with 20% of the title share, and 10% of the unit share would have a .5 efficiency. An efficiency of 1 is the market average: 100% of the title count delivering 100% of the unit sales. A publisher that achieves its share with fewer titles will have a higher ratio. Publishers under the 1.0 threshold typically have many titles in the bookscan data, but they are just not selling many units.

Categories and the Publishers who dominate them

The following category images are for Q1 2007 and the publisher share of titles based on units. The top titles listed for each area, listed below, are also for Q1 '07.

Category: Systems and Programming

In this category you can see that Pearson has the largest market share among the publishers with O'Reilly second. If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top five imprints are O'Reilly at 16% share, Microsoft Press at 15%, Addison-Wesley at 9%, For Dummies at 8%, and Sams at 7%.

Sys Prog Pub Q1 07

As you can see in the table below, Pearson and Wiley's market share is primarily driven by title count, whereas Microsoft Press sells twice as many units per title -- they are the most efficient publisher in this space. O'Reilly's performance is a mix of both. That is, we have quite a few titles, but our efficiency is also above the market average.

sys & prog - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2007 - 03/31/2007 )

Publisher Units Title Count Units/Title Efficiency
Pearson 174,209 682 255 0.92
O'Reilly 121,505 334 364 1.31
Wiley 111,606 372 300 1.08
Microsoft 85,611 135 634 2.29
McGraw Hill 32,827 146 225 0.81
Apress 21,159 103 205 0.74
Thomson 16,941 118 144 0.52
Reed Elsevierr 9,997 104 96 0.35

Note: This category family contains Microsoft Access, which could have gone in the business apps category. However, the Access books sit here and are among the leading titles. The leading Titles and Publishers for Systems and Programming are:

  1. RMC Press's PMP Exam Prep: Rita's Course in a Book for Passing the PMP Exam
  2. Microsoft Press's Microsoft Office Access 2003 Step by Step
  3. Wiley's Access 2003 All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies
  4. Cisco Press's CCNA Official Exam Certification Library
  5. Wiley's Networking All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
  6. O'Reilly's Head First Java

Category: Web Design and Development

In this category you can see that Pearson has the largest market share among the publishers with O'Reilly second. If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top five imprints are O'Reilly at 17% share, Peachpit at 16%, For Dummies at 11%, Sams at 5%, and New Riders at 5%.

Web Dev

As you can see in the table below, Pearson has the most titles, and with Peachpit's excellent title efficiency, their performance is strong in this category. In this category, most of the top publishers are above the title efficiency average of 1.0. (This suggests that there are a lot of second-tier publishers with lower efficiency who don't show up in the table.)

web des & dev - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2007 - 03/31/2007 )

Publisher Units Title Count Units/Title Efficiency
Pearson 112,827 200 564 1.22
O'Reilly 74,560 121 616 1.33
Wiley 67,451 143 472 1.02
Apress 24,380 79 309 0.66
Microsoft 11,055 20 553 1.19

The leading Titles and Publishers for Web Design and Development are:

  1. Peachpit's HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual Quickstart
  2. New Rider's Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
  3. Pragmatic Press's Agile Web Development with Rails
  4. Wiley's Creating Web Pages For Dummies
  5. O'Reilly's Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
  6. O'Reilly's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

Category: Business Applications

In this category you can see that Wiley has the largest market share among the publishers with Pearson second. If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top five imprints are For Dummies at 31% share, Microsoft Press at 15%, McGraw Hill at 8%, Que at 8%, and Peachpit at 6%.

Bus Apps Publisher

As you can see in the table below, Wiley has the most titles to help keep their market share and with For Dummies' excellent title efficiency, their performance is strong in this category. Microsoft Press also has a very healthy title efficiency. But the category seems to be a tough one on title efficiency for five of the top publishers.

bus apps - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2007 - 03/31/2007 )

Publisher Units Title Count Units/Title Efficiency
Wiley 179,880 247 728 1.50
Pearson 87,231 217 402 0.83
Microsoft 62,110 74 839 1.73
McGraw Hill 35,636 57 625 1.29
O'Reilly 16,848 53 318 0.66
Thomson 11,660 75 155 0.32
Apress 5,219 19 275 0.57
Independent Publishers Group 4,658 19 245 0.51

The leading Titles and Publishers for Business Applications are:

  1. McGraw Hill's QuickBooks 2007 The Official Guide
  2. Wiley's eBay For Dummies
  3. Wiley's Excel 2003 for Dummies
  4. Microsoft's Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Step by Step
  5. Wiley's QuickBooks 2007 For Dummies

Category: Consumer Operating Systems

In this category you can see that Wiley has the largest market share among the publishers with Pearson and Microsoft Press tied for second at 13%. (Apologies: the Pearson % is cut off in the graph.) If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top five imprints are For Dummies at 32% share, Microsoft Press at 14%, O'Reilly at 11%, Que at 9%, and Wiley's Visual imprint at 7%.

Cons Opsys Imprint

As you can see in the table below, Wiley has the most titles and a relatively good efficiency rating. Microsoft Press also has a very healthy title efficiency rate. O'Reilly is the only other publisher with an efficiency rating slightly higher than the market average.

cons opsys & dev - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2007 - 03/31/2007 )

Publisher Units Title Count Units/Title Efficiency
Wiley 134,486 110 1,223 1.42
Pearson 41,743 85 491 0.57
Microsoft 38,017 20 1,901 2.21
O'Reilly 32,432 36 901 1.05
McGraw Hill 16,804 33 509 0.59
Thomson 12,704 26 489 0.57

The leading Titles and Publishers for Consumer Operating Systems are:

  1. Wiley's Windows XP For Dummies
  2. Wiley's Windows Vista For Dummies
  3. O'Reilly's Mac OS X Tiger: The Missing Manual
  4. Microsoft's Windows Vista Inside Out
  5. Wiley's Windows Vista All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
  6. Wiley's Windows XP All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies

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Comments: 3

Michael R. Bernstein   [05.14.07 05:01 PM]

links in the first paragraph are completely broken.

Michael Ninness   [05.16.07 03:08 PM]

Any chance you can add your analysis of the Digital Media Applications category as well?


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