Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Tim O'Reilly <tim () oreilly com>
Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:08:14 -0700
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator

Folks on the list might be interested in the posting I just made to the
"O'Reilly Radar" blog (http://radar.oreilly.com):

Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/04/book_sales_as_a.html

Synopsis below:

Based on data from Neilsen Bookscan, which aggregates point-of-sale
data from about 70% of US bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
Borders, and many smaller chains and leading independent bookstores,
computer book sales, which have been falling by about 20% a year since
2001, have stabilized, and started to climb again. O'Reilly's internal
market research group has built a MySQL data mart containing the
Bookscan data since early 2003, and uses it for visualization and trend
analysis. In this posting, I draw a few conclusions based on a
year-on-year comparison of 2004 and 2005. Apart from giving us some
interesting technology trend indicators (C# is gaining on Java, python
is gaining on perl, InDesign is eating Quark's lunch), the data may
also give us some intriguing insight into other economic factors. For
example, might the increase in sales of books on QuickBooks and Excel
indicate a rise in small business activity?
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Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472
707-827-7000
http://www.oreilly.com (company), http://tim.oreilly.com (personal)


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