"hard numbers" entries

State of the Computer Book Market, Q406, Part 2: Category Winners and Losers

Yesterday, I talked about the overall state of the computer book market. In this installment: category visualizations and trends showing which technologies are winning and which are losing in the book market. Here's a treemap view of the quarter on quarter differences between Q4 of 2006 and the same period last year: As I've previously described in Book Sales as…

State of the Computer Book Market, Q4 06, Part 1, Overall Market Trend

As I try to do each quarter, here’s a report on the state of the computer book market, as revealed by data from Nielsen Bookscan’s top 3,000 Computer Books report. (See my entry Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator for a description of our methodology.)   Here’s the year-on-year trend since 2003: As you can see, the strong start…

Don't Count Out Newspapers

OSCON Alumnus Graeme Merrall is now an architect at News Digital Media (a Rupert Murdoch company based in Australia). He dropped this tidbit in conversation: In 2004 news.com.au served more traffic every day than we served on 9/11. When Shapelle Corby was found guilty we trebled our normal traffic and we now serve more than that every day. When Steve…

State of the Computer Book Market, Q306, Part 2

Last week, I talked about the overall state of the computer book market. But most of our readers don't care about the publishing business. They care about the technologies we cover. Here's where we get to the meat: category visualizations and trends showing which technologies are winning and which are losing in the book market. Here's a treemap view of…

State of the Computer Book Market, Q306, Part 1, Overall Market Trend

As I try to do each quarter, here’s a report on the state of the computer book market, as revealed by data from Nielsen Bookscan’s top 3,000 Computer Books report. (See my entry Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator for a description of our methodology.)   Here’s the year-on-year trend since 2003:…