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In the topsy-turvy world of publishing, books remain a fundamental source of information for developers.
November 06, 2007
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/computer-books-reading-between-the-lines/202802955
The phrase "we want to publish your blog" has crept into the list of phrases you never expected to hear, just after "we want to option the movie rights to your blog." A friend of mine has been making a good living self-publishing books online, while other friends who used to earn a steady income writing computer books have had to find some way to keep food on the table. Things are changing in the world of computer book publishing, that's for sure.
Is the market for computer books in a slump? Dying? Already dead and it just hasn't noticed yet? It depends on whom you talk to.
Right up front this has to be acknowledged: If you want to know what the trends are in computer book publishing, you check with Tim O'Reilly. Nobody is more tapped into the research on what's moving and who's moving it than Tim. In his quarterly report on the state of the computer book market, Tim draws upon Bookscan's weekly tallies of book sales, folds in various other statistical ingredients, then cooks the result into a palatable dish for public consumption. Or actually Mike Hendrickson does that, since Tim turned the report over to him this year. But you know Tim's looking over his shoulder, studying the numbers and the colorful charts, perching in the leaf nodes of those treemaps like a statistical Julia Butterfly Hill.
Which is kind of strange because if you believe the legend, Tim already knows what's hot before it's hot. It's that O'Reilly radar. I'm not making this up; you can read about it in back issues of Wired. But Tim is such a professional that even though he knows the answers instinctively, he still does the research. It's from the O'Reilly analyses that you'll learn things like:
Web Design and Development as a book category is surprisingly down.
There are a remarkable four Ubuntu titles in O'Reilly's top 10 ten opsys books.
Microsoft Press is highly efficient, selling twice as many units per title as Pearson or Wiley.
But what if you still have questions after you study every O'Reilly report and climbed every O'Reilly Treemap? Rude questions like:
Is computer book publishing finished?
Do we really need 40 books on the same subject?
Are computer books even necessary?
And why do so many computer books suck?
If these are the kind of questions that come to your mind when you think about computer book publishing, where do you go for answers?
I don't know where you go, but I went to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt of The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Thomas and Hunt see a dramatic shift in the center of power in publishing over the past five years.
"The power has moved relentlessly away from the publishers of information into the hands of the consumers of information," Thomas says. "And that's exactly how it should be—information will become free. We see more and more of the world's information moving online. It is being created and maintained by communities of (mostly) volunteers, and being read for free by anyone who knows how to follow a hyperlink. From blogs, online essays, and entire electronic books to vast resources such as Wikipedia, the world has changed forever. At the same time, communities have formed to vet this information, winnowing the wheat from the chaff. From simple mailing lists, to tumbleblogs, to sites such as anachaia and reddit, an interested reader is never short of recommendations."
So, where does this leave the publisher?
"Frankly," Thomas says, "I think that publishing in its current form is dead."
That's a remarkable statement from a computer book publisher.
"Most publishers view themselves as a conduit for information," Thomas says. "They see their capital value as their list of current and past titles, authors as a resource to be mined in the creation of these assets, and their readers as simple consumers. [They] live in an industry where the power comes traditionally from the ability to choose topics for books, and to distribute these paper books to consumers. So we have publishers who see themselves as a machine for converting authors' thoughts into paper books, a channel that is an incredibly inefficient distribution system, and booksellers who dislike taking risks. And all of that worked in a world where publishers and distributors were an effective oligopoly."
But the Internet has changed all that. In this new world, Thomas says, "authors are free to create information for themselves—a billion potential readers are just a few clicks away, and they no longer need publishers and distributors to get what they write into the hands of readers. Services such as Lulu even allow these new authors to have their work printed as paper books. Publishing has become an individual, not a corporate, act."
But can computer book publishing really be dead? Wouldn't we have noticed?
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.
So what does "reinventing the category" mean in technological terms? Is the future of the book a PDF on your PDA?
Actually that particular combination leaves something to be desired, but the PDF format is currently part of the thinking of most innovators in publishing "Because technology changes rapidly, we feel that information should be made available rapidly," Thomas says. "We make all our books available as PDFs, so they can be downloaded immediately. We also make many of our books available online before they are even finished. This gives our readers access to information far, far earlier than if they'd had to wait for the book to get finished, go through production, and then conventional distribution. It also gives our authors invaluable feedback during the writing process—our readers are not shy when it comes to pointing out ways in which beta books can be improved."
And on that blog-to-book thing: It's real. Ellen Gerstein, who actually turns blogs into books, advises, if you want to leverage your blog, that "niche is a good thing." Wiley Book editor Chris Webb reveals that on his blog (not yet a book) at ckwebb.com/books/ from-blogs-to-books-questions-from-blogher. Even pros can stumble in this changing field: Seth Godin (sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/02/please_dont_buy.html) learned the hard way just what a Creative Commons license means. And Google hasn't exactly done a perfect job with Google Books, its foray into the field, which Charles Petzold calls "a massive heap of digitized books and periodicals thrown together with a complete disregard for what these objects actually are and when they were published." Ouch.
Computer book author Rose Kelleher addresses that question directly at www.ramblingrose.com/ComputerBooks.htm, one of her points being that traditional publishers pay the same royalty for a technical book that will be dead when the next rev of the product comes out as for a novel that could stay in print till it's out of copyright.
"The economics of the situation demand that larger publishers put out X number of books a year," Dave Thomas says, "regardless of topic or quality." I've never quite understood that, but it may be moot at this point. And, Thomas says, "small publishers can be much more selective." Fewer computer books, but better? As a writer, I take that as a challenge. As a reader, I take it as good news.
And the field of computer book publishing could use some of that.
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