Mike Hendrickson

Mike Hendrickson has held a variety of positions in the publishing industry including, Product Development Manager, Editor, Executive Editor, Editor-in-Chief, and Associate Publisher. Two constants are that he has always enjoyed meeting tech people and being involved with cutting-edge technologies. At O’Reilly, he is a Vice President for Content Strategy. He is the co-Author of The Best Android Apps.

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

In this fourth post 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.

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.)

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.

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

What you won't see on this chart is that 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.

… Web Page Creation 4.77% -15.57% Large category with 42 new titles published but 30 that fell out of the rankings. 4 of the top 5 titles sold fewer units in 2008 than in 2007.

Ignite Boston 5

Ignite Boston 5 – February 12th @ the Hooley House

Is Adobe Still Sleeping Well?

Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what…

Ignite Boston 4 — Videos Uploaded

Ignite Boston 4 was an interesting and insightful event. We have many things to take away as we plan our next event for January.

Ignite Boston 4 – Tonight!

Ignite Boston 4 is this Thursday at the Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston from 6:00 pm until ~10:00.

Ignite Boston 4

The fourth Ignite Boston will be on Thursday, September 11, from 6 to 10pm at the Hooley House, one block from Faneuil Hall in Boston, MA. THIS IS A LARGER VENUE. So the acoustics will be better than our last event and there will be room to sit, stand and mingle. From 6-6:45 pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. After the mingling and social stuff, we’ll have a couple of special keynote presentations to kick off our Ignite talks. Then, onto guest speakers who’ll catch you up on the cool, new, innovative stuff going on in technology today. Don’t blink or you’ll miss their lightning-fast, five-minute presentations.

Ignite Boston 3 – Next week

beer, boston, cambridge, conversation, geeks, ignite, microsoft, o'reilly, tech talks