Computer Books

By Andrew Grabois - Aug 06 , 2007

Computer books have taken a hit over the last five years.

According to Simba Information’s annual report, Business of Consumer Book Publishing, the computer books category generated $380 million dollars in 2006, a decrease of 5% from 2005. Since 2002, sales in the category have decreased almost 17%. Consumer dollars spent on computer books accounted for 6% of all consumer dollars spent on books last year, down from 6.2% in 2005 and 7.3% in 2002. The top five revenue-generating publishers rang up over $347 million in sales, or over 91% of all dollars spent in the category. The top houses were John Wiley & Sons, Pearson, Thomson Learning, Microsoft Press, and McGraw-Hill.

Simba’s estimates are based on data compiled by the Association of American Publishers from responses to its survey of member companies. It is a snapshot of gross market size, not an explanation of inner market dynamics.

If you really want to get under the hood and understand what is happening in the world of computer books, you have to read Tim O’Reilly’s quarterly report on the state of the computer book market. O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., an innovative and successful publisher of computer books. The results of his quarterly reports are released on his blog, O’Reilly Radar.

In 2005, O’Reilly Research loaded BookScan’s top 3,000 computer books into a MySQL-based data mart. The BookScan sales data was then enhanced by the addition of bibliographic data and customer ratings and reviews spidered from Amazon. The books were grouped in as many ways as possible to determine performance patterns. O’Reilly’s manipulation of the enhanced BookScan sales data for the last four years yielded the following conclusions:

• The computer book market shrunk 20% a year between 2001 and 2003, before stabilizing in 2004 and coming to rest at about half the size it was in the last boom year of 2000
• Sales of books based on software will tank many months before a new release is scheduled to hit the market
• Programming languages are down, with the exception of something called Ruby on Rails (RoR)
• Software engineering is up. O’Reilly thinks that this means developers are trying to upgrade their skills in a tough job market. (Publishers Weekly thinks that programmers are holding back on purchases to see which way the wind blows.)
• In 2004, books on the iPod and Sharepoint (collaborative software used to create wikis), two entirely new products, took the market by storm and offered publishers hope for the future
• Growth areas are–

• Web development & design
• Databases
• Software engineering
• Small business apps like Quickbooks
• Sharepoint
• Consumer electronics
• Windows OS
• Microsoft certification
• Computers and Society

• Books on Office 97 Suite are up, but books on the individual suite applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, are down
• Mac OS and Adobe Photoshop are in decline while the market waits for new releases. Photo editing is expected to be a huge growth category later in 2007

Everyone agrees that the computer books category has to reinvent itself to adapt to changing times. The question is whether its current embrace of the mass market of lay users will be enough to offset its considerable losses in the professional sector.

As always, book publishers were a little slow to catch on to the crash. Before going into a freefall, the number of new computer books actually increased 18% from 2002 to 2003. According to Books In Print, 5,498 new computer books were published in the U.S. in 2006, a 10% decrease from 2005, and a 39% decrease from 2003. Below is a graph charting the downward trend of new computer books published between 2002 and 2006:

Of the 5,498 new computer books published last year:

• 33% were hardcovers
• 66% were paperback editions
• 27% were reviewed in at least one source monitored by Bowker
• 0.3% appeared on at least one bestseller list monitored by Bowker

Bestselling computer books at Amazon and Barnes & Noble come from the growth areas identified by Tim O’Reilly: Adobe Photoshop, Sharepoint, Windows Vista, Quickbooks and various titles from what he called the Computers & Society category.

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, 9 are digital photography titles, and 6 of those are Adobe Photoshop. Author Scott Kelby owns the digital photography franchise, penning four bestsellers, including list toppers The Digital Photography Book (Peachpit Press) and The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers (New Riders). Joining Kelby is Sharepoint 2007 Users Guide, by Seth Bates et al (Springer-Verlag New York); Windows Vista Inside Out, by Ed Bott et al (Microsoft Press); Quickbooks 2007: The Official Guide, by Kathy Ivens (McGraw-Hill); Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott et al (Penguin Group); and Send: The Essential Guide to E-Mail for Office and Home, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe (Knopf). Still going strong is Rita Mulcahy’s self-published PMP Exam Prep, Fifth Edition, the bestselling computer book of 2005.