Dumbing Down
Publishing consultant Andrew Grabois, who writes about computer book publishing for Beneath the Cover (www.beneaththecover.com), put it more modestly in a recent report: "Computer books have taken a hit over the last five years." (You'll notice that he highlights the same five-year window as Thomas.)
It was quite a hit: Grabois cites Simba Information research that shows a drop in computer book sales since 2002 of 17 percent. But he acknowledges that O'Reilly's numbers are drawn from more sources and may paint a truer picture. O'Reilly's analysis has the industry shrinking in sales by 20 percent a year from the boom year of 2000 to more or less stabilize at half the 2000 sales volume by 2004. All right, the boom years was just that, a boom year. Computer book sales can be expected to track the ups and downs of the industry. But the past five years clearly reflect something else. Computer books as books are suffering.
Grabois says, "Everyone agrees that the computer books category has to reinvent itself to adapt to changing times." Pragmatic Bookshelf takes a dramatically different approach to the processes and the economics of book publishing, but Thomas readily admits "that's just a stop gap—we're simply removing inefficiencies from the legacy publishing system."
The Dummies series and similar appeals to the masses were an attempt at a serious redefinition of the field, but Grabois wonders "whether its current embrace of the mass market of lay users will be enough to offset its considerable losses in the professional sector."
The professional sector? Tim O'Reilly, I believe that's your cue.
O'Reilly surrogate Mike Hendrickson sees Web 2.0 and digital media books pulling the industry part-way out of a deep slump. "In the first quarter of 2007, we hoped that the Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 releases would cause a similar sharp increase in our trend lines. That has not materialized, and in fact, you could say that Microsoft's new releases have not lived up to expectations yet, at least for book sales." Early 2007 numbers did not match the 2006 numbers, and "the market slump is broad-based, and that new categories like Vista and Office 2007 aren't enough to offset the overall market decline."
Are there any bright spots in computer book sales? Hendrickson: "Ruby on Rails has continued its blazing growth...Agile is a category that is growing and one to watch...Python is also experiencing good growth...We see a large increase in the category of .Net programming [especially] MCTS certification, WPF, and WCF...I expect [Photoshop] to be a huge growth category by the end of 2007..."
And that's about it. It's no surprise that Hendrickson singles out Photoshop books. The top-selling computer books on Amazon in recent years have frequently been Photoshop books. Grabois says: "Looking at Amazon's computer books bestseller list, it is apparent that digital photography in general, and Adobe Photoshop in particular, will be the killer-category-within-a-category that will drive sales over all. Of Amazon's top 25 bestselling computer books, nine are digital photography titles, and six of those are Adobe Photoshop."
Digital photography, which is not what I think of when I think of computer technology, outpaces all "real" computer topics in book sales. But even there, you can sense change in the wind: Earlier I mentioned a friend who is making a good living self-publishing books online. That's Thom Hogan, and his books are Nikon digital and film camera guides published in e-book form on CD-ROM and sold only through his website (www.bythom.com). Thom's doing his part to reinvent the category.
