"Bookscan" entries
State of the Computer Book Market, part 2: The Categories
Charting computer book sales across categories.
In this second installment of "State of the Computer Book Market" we look at computer book sales in specific technology categories.
State of the Computer Book Market, part 1: Overall Market
Top-level views of the overall book market and the computer book market.
The tech book market has been going through some major changes, but none more profound than the closing of Borders. Much of what you will see in the 2012 trends are directly related to Border's demise, though the faint signals that the book market provides to other industries are still evident.
State of the Computer Book Market – Mid-Year 2009
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.
At Risk: Universal Online Access to All Knowledge
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.
State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2: The Technologies
Recapping the big picture from the last post, 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.