[foo] Tim on book sales
Tim O’Reilly is giving a talk on what book sales tell us about the industry.
He says that .Net O’Reilly books have sea creatures on the cover because Microsoft would like to cover most of the earth’s surface.
Java titles are trending down (in terms of market share), but C# and PHP are on the upswing. C and C++ sales are steady.
Oracle is down. MySQL is up.
Reference books don’t do nearly as well as tips ‘n’ tricks because reference works so well on the Web.
In any particular thematic area (e.g., programming books), a few books do very well and the rest don’t. Books that do well for O’Reilly bring in %8K-$30K/week, although I missed the beginning of what he said and thus may have gotten that wrong.
The Red Hat book market has dropped 60% over a few months, but books for other distributions of linux have taken up the slack.
Mac, which has 3% market share, has 25% of the book share. (This to me proves that the Mac is too hard to use :)
Or maybe the mac bookshare means that mac users Really Really likes their macs and want to figure out how to use them more and better while the windows users just don’t care. (At least I’ve seen that in effect a few times).
– ask
I saw Tim and others from O’Reilly give a version of this talk at OSCON, and I recall Tim (or someone–I think it was Tim) making the argument parallel to your argument about the 3%/25% split about some other product. It is a fascinating talk, isn’t it?
Actually, it proves Mac users are better writers!