Computer book publisher O’Reilly has a series of postings on the US Computer Book Market in Q22006 compared to last year, using Nielsen BookScan data as a basis. Overall the market was a bit better than last year:
The second quarter of 2006 was about 1.5% above the same quarter in 2005, with 1,781,390 units reported sold versus 1,753,735 in the prior period. We didn't quite fall back to 2005 levels, but we didn't see a continuation of or even a hoped-for increase over Q1's 6% increase. Reported revenues for the quarter were up 3% over the same period in 2005, to $63,319,058, due to an increase in the average price of a computer book from $37.54 to $37.78
There has been movement in various topics, the author notes:
- C# book sales continues to gain on Java, with a 49% unit sales increase compared to Java's 10% decrease.
- Ruby continues its momentum, and is the fastest-growing programming language in terms of book sales.
- Microsoft's new release of SQL Server has continued to drive significant book sales, with that market up 86%. ASP.Net is also on a roll, with book sales up 61%.
- It's amazing how many books so simple a device as the iPod can manage to sell!
Also driven by its use in AJAX applications, Javascript is in a resurgence, up 171%.
However they do note that some of these values are affected by the releases of new versions of software or the availability of books.
In looking at publishers, O'Reilly is the #1 imprint in terms of revenue followed by Microsoft and the For Dummies line.