Before we get to the specifics of the computer book market, let’s get some context by looking at the whole book market for the week ending December 25, 2011. Everything that is printed, bound, and sold as a book, from Steve Jobs and Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back to Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever and StrengthsFinder 2.0 is represented in the table below.

Overall Book Market - EVERYTHING - Week Ending: 2011-12-25

As you can see, the computer market is up about 2% from last year which is much better than the whole market being down more than -9%. It should be noted that the computer book market makes up only about 1% of total unit sales in bookstores and online retailers. Also, for this report and the following four posts, I am using a data that is aggregated from weekly reports of the Top 3000 titles in Bookscan. So the numbers for all the long-tail titles are not included here. In other words the data in the table above shows a 2% growth and yet our top 3000 data shows a 0.7% growth. This actually means that a considerable number of long-tail titles sold in 2011 yet did not make it past the minimum threshold to make a weekly top 3000 report. If you would like to see the performance of the major book categories, this table shows percentage growth. I find it interesting that the Religion/Bibles category is the largest-growing category in an otherwise depressed market. Only 10 out of the 47 overall categories showed growth in 2011 and the computer category was one of them. We’ll look at precisely what fueled the growth for the computer category in future posts.

Now on to the technology book market. The four charts below provide some perspective into how each year stacks up against prior years from a Units and Title Count as well as Average Pages per book, and Average Price per book. The third and fourth charts provide context to how many new Titles were published during a given year and what the threshold was to make the Top 3000 report on a weekly basis. The chart on the top left shows the overall units sold per year with the Red Line showing the number of distinct titles that made the Bookscan Top 3000 weekly report. Looking at the two together provides a better insight into what happened. Basically as fewer units were sold, it looks as though more titles were published. Yet as you can see in the chart at the bottom of the four charts, there were fewer new titles in 2011 that contributed to the total units sold. So this leads me to believe that the numeric threshold to get into the dataset of the Top 3000 titles sold on a weekly basis was lower than previous years. And in fact the bottom right chart shows this was the case as 2011 had the lowest threshold in all years measured. So fewer books made the data with fewer of them being new and they had fewer pages and were priced lower on average than ever before. And yet the market showed a slight increase, so this must have come as a result of a few stellar performers that were likely titles published before 2011. We’ll explore this in the coming posts, so hang on to this thought.

Units and Distinct Title Count

Average Pages and Average Price

Percent of New Titles

Minimum threshold for DataSet

Immediately below is the weekly trend (from the Top 3000 titles reported weekly) for the entire computer book market since 2004, when we first obtained reliable data from Bookscan. Please remember that the data represents all publishers, and not just O’Reilly. The slightly thicker red line represents the 2011 data.

The clear seasonal pattern that we’ve pointed out before still exists, but with more extreme fluctuations. That is, we have a strong start that declines through the summer, spikes for the fall “Back to School” season, and finishes the year strong. And each subsequent year closely mirrors the year before but with usually a percent tick or two lower. But the biggest news for 2011 was that we had some weeks that were clearly above prior years and one week that was the highest we’ve seen for all the years. However, this boon comes through the unfortunate Borders fire sale, and then the eventual liquidation of their remaining inventory. In my opinion, it is too early to predict what long-term effect we will see with Borders gone, because as you’ll notice as soon as their doors closed, the market hit bottom. Not only did it hit bottom, but the market tanked further down than we have ever seen it. But the reason I still think we are not in a pattern of predictability yet is that the December climb up was higher than the four previous years. So in a nutshell, 2011 was a year of our highest highs and our lowest lows and that was likely due to the Borders situation.

What you won’t see on this chart is that the computer book market suffered its biggest losses in 2001 and then began shrinking 20 percent a year for 3 years, until it stabilized in 2004 at about half the size it was in 2000. (We have consistent and reliable data going back to 2004.) You can now see a second cratering in the market that started in the second half of 2008 and continued through 2010 until the more volatile and unpredictable 2011. The overall market growth rates for the previous seven years are: 2005 = 1.48%; 2006 = 3.17%; 2007 = -2.00%; 2008 = -4.27%; 2009 = -15.31%; 2010 = -4.29%; 2011 = +0.7%

So what about that market was news in 2011 other than Borders? In 2011, There were 21 weeks in the year that were ahead of the same week in 2010. In 2010 there were 11 weeks that were ahead of the prior year unit sales and in 2009, there were only two weeks that were ahead of the prior year. I am not willing to state that we are seeing a recovery in the market because a .7% growth is not exactly a strong signal in the right direction. To the optimists in the crowd, it appears as though we have seen bottom in October through November of 2011 — but pessimists will believe that they’ve seen this before: the market looks as though it hit bottom, but then takes another big hit downward. 2009 (the green line) was a turbulent rollercoaster ride to the bottom as well. So at this time the market is really too unstable to predict whether it will move down again or continue to recover.

Another way to look at the market is with the Treemap visualization tool. This tool helps us pick up on trends quickly, even when looking at thousands of books. It works like this:

The size of a square shows the market share and relative size of a category, while the color shows the rate of change in sales. Red is down, and green is up, with the intensity of the color representing the magnitude of the change. The following screenshot of our treemap shows gains and losses by category, comparing the fourth quarter of 2011 with the fourth quarter of 2010.

So what are all the boxes and colors telling us? First remember that this is compares the last quarters of the previous two years.

There were quite a few bright spots (bright green) during the last quarter of 2011. Take a look at Android Programming (in the upper-left box), the bright-green box showing growth from the fourth quarter of 2010. Right next to Android is iOS which is larger in size, but Black which means flat growth. You will also see Android again in bright-green (upper-middle box) — the difference is that the upper-left is for programmer-oriented books and the upper-middle is for Android consumer books [using your Droid]. Both had impressive growth in 2011 compared to 2010. In the upper-middle area is iPad and iPhone for consumers which where flat or down. I wonder if the iPhone 4GS was as big of a hit as the iPhone 4. The iPad, the upper-middle big black square, continues to impress with how big the box is at this early point in its evolution, and is flat because both years have netted lots of units sold. Look at Windows 7 just below iPad and notice that the iPad size is about 3/5 as big as Windows 7. That is amazing to me, as the iPad has grown to be almost as big as the business desktop operating system.

In 2010, Windows 7 was the number one growth area for units, followed by iPad, then Android (for consumers), and Android programming. This is unit growth, and a bit of the success for these technologies is that they are fairly new and do not have large market shares as a base to be measured against Looking at longer-established technologies, Security and Network Security and Digital Photography had strong unit growth.

I find it useful to organize the trends into classifications that are High Growth Categories bright green, Moderate Growth Categories dark green to black, Categories to Watch all colors, and Down Categories red to bright red. Most of these descriptions are self-explanatory, except perhaps Categories to Watch. This group contains titles that we’ve found are not typically susceptible to seasonal swings, as well as areas on our editorial radar. If there are categories you want to get on our watch list, please let me know: [email protected].

The table below highlights and explains some of the data from the chart above, although the data is for all of 2011. The Share column shows the total market share of that category, and the ROC column shows the Rate of Change (RoC = (current_period - prev_period) / prev_period). So, for example, you can see that Mac OS books represent 2.79% of the entire computer book market, and were shrinking by -7.49% (RoC).

Clicking on the charts below will produce a larger view. When viewing the charts below, keep the reference charts above in mind. Viewing these jointly provides more context on the size of market and seasonal patterns.

Category_Family: Consumer Operating Systems and Devices

Here are the trend lines for the five main categories (cat_family) that make up Consumer Operating Systems and Devices.

This category is a medium-sized area and was the one of three Category Families to show growth year-over-year. This category’s growth is driven by the iPad, the iPhone and the Nook in the Portable Devices sub-category.

The consumer operating systems and devices market shows ups and downs each year and pretty closely reflects what is going on in the whole market. If you compare the growth of Mac OS X with Microsoft Windows, the Windows books had in increase in 2010 but both declined in 2011. The chart below shows how these two are stacked up against each other. Foreshadowing the 2012 results, I believe that the Windows category will be up because Windows 8 will ship and be a significant upgrade for most. I believe that Apple will continue to decline as they roll out $29 upgrades that are minimal. The iPad, iPhone, and Android devices will continue to soar.

Category_Family: Business/Office Applications

When comparing the Business Apps area for 2010 and 2011, there were 12 super_cats (one level below cat_family) that performed ahead of the prior year and 21 that underperformed compared to the prior year. The 21 underperforming super_cats only lost 2,090 more units than the 12 positive areas had gained, for an overall -0.44% growth rate.

The three healthiest super categories were Office Suites at 7.49% growth, Collaboration Technologies at 12.43% growth and Social Network (Facebook) at 11.73% growth, while Presentation Topics at -11.88%, Accounting at -8.21%, and Search at -15.30% saw the biggest drop in units for this Business category. It is interesting to see that Spreadsheets is pretty much the same as the market. A very slight uptick in growth, 88 more units in 2011 that 2010, and is still a large super category in rank. Spreadsheets trails only Digital Photography and Tablets for the top spot as the biggest super category.

Here are the trend lines for the eight categories that make up Business/Office Applications.

Notice how much bigger of a category “office” is than the other two (“gen bus app” & “design”). But the news in this category is that Office titles have slightly stabilized, having gone from -4.66% decrease last year to a -0.48% decrease this year. This decline mirrors the overall market. The category has been dominated by entry level user books. These sort of entry level books are driven by Series that have consistent promises and both Dummies and Microsoft Press each held four spots in the top 10 best sellers list for this category. This does make sense when you think about it. I said last year that it looked like Dummies have a bit of a book dynasty, so to speak, but in 2011 Microsoft Press rocketed into this space well. The category chart Web Apps is mostly dominated by books on Facebook. Who would have thought you’d need a book on how to use Facebook? These are not programming Facebook APIs, but rather how to use the Social Network. Foreshadowing 2012, I expect that this Category Family will continue to do well as Windows 8 will undoubtedly create more demand for Office books in 2012.

Category_Family: Web Design and Development

Web Design and Development is down -4.36% from 2010 to 2011. Another 37,438 fewer units were sold in this category in 2011 than in 2010. And remember, 2010 was one of the worst years we’ve seen in awhile for this category. There were eight sub areas that showed growth in this category — HTML5 at 74.60% growth and Social Web at 9.36% and JavaScript at 17.32% growth led the way in 2011 for this area. If we combine HTML5 and JavaScript because they are very closely related, the combined growth rate is a healthy 41.39% growth and 45,559 more units sold in 2011. O’Reilly has three of the top five books in this area with Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript leading the category in unit sales for two years in a row. Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML and JavaScript: The Good Parts also cracked the top five for us.

The areas that surprised me the most, though, were Web Programming which saw ~25,152 fewer units sold in 2011 than in 2010 or a -23.61 growth. And closely behind was Web Design Tools that produced -16,534 fewer units for -23.67% growth and Web Development producing -11,684 fewer units and -28.54% growth. Yet HTML5 and JavaScript are growing. This is a bit perplexing but could be attributed to developers wanting more specific topics rather broad reaching topics and tools. In Web Design Tools it is mostly Dreamweaver’s fall that puts this category down. In Web Development it is Website creation type of books for “beginners” and “dummies” that have fallen the most.

Here are the trend lines for the eight categories that make up Web Design and Development.

Obviously the big sub categories here are “web design” and “web development.” It is dominated by titles that talk about performance, scalability, reliability, and tuning. Similar to what you will find at our Velocity Conference. Foreshadowing for 2012, the area to watch is JavaScript. Doesn’t everyone need to know and learn JavaScript?

Category_Family: Systems and Programming

This is the largest of our top-level category families. It is the place where most of the programming language, database, and software development titles reside. There are now 73 super_cat subcategories (super category) in this area and in 2011, 46 of the areas were negative year-over-year and only 27 areas had growth. There were -68,0295 fewer units sold in these areas during 2011. This is only a -3.14% decline, so this large family of titles actually performed slightly worse than the overall market. Mobile Programming and Data Analysis were the two biggest growing areas. Mobile Programming produced 30,636 more units for a 38.84% growth rate while Data Analysis produced 22,925 more units for 22.42% growth rate in 2011.

The top five performing categories, in order, were Mobile Programming, Data Analysis, Security Topics [+9,648 units / 5.53% growth], Java [+7,316 units / 7.33% growth], and Python [4,886 / 10.55% growth]. The categories with the worst performance, in order, were IT Certification [-19,078 / -31.50% growth], Windows Administration [-14,852 units / -14.13% growth], Microsoft Programming [-13,491 / -27.70% growth], C# [-12,993 units / -20.26% growth], and Network General [-11,234 / -19.04% growth].

In the top performing area of Mobile Programming, iOS was nine times as large as Android in 2009, and roughly 2.5 times as large of a category in 2010, and today sells only 1.2 times as many copies of Android books to Developers. Again, this is developer books, not consumer-oriented titles. For more on how the mobile developer market is shaping up, it seems like a two horse race with iOS and Android. Windows Mobile is a blip along with cross-platform solutions like PhoneGap as you can see in the image directly below.

This chart shows the number of units (sum of Unit in blue bars) and the Average units per title (AvgUnitsTitle in red line) for the mobile area. Android has a higher unit average whereas iOS has more units sold because more titles made the list. This all makes me wonder about the Windows Mobile blip and whether Microsoft should just jump into the Android space too or continue to make more from licensing it than their own platform.

Here are the trend lines for the 12 categories that make up Systems and Programming.

The following category images are for 2011, and the tables have each publisher’s count of titles and sum of units. The top titles are also listed for each area in 2011.

Category: Systems and Programming

In this category, you can see that O’Reilly still has the largest market share among the publishers, with Pearson a close second. If we drill into this picture of the Publishers and down to the imprint level, the picture of who is driving market gets clearer. The top six imprints are O’Reilly at 13.00%, Addison-Wesley at 10.23%, Microsoft Press at 9.09%, For Dummies at 7.40%, McGraw Hill at 5.79%, and Prentice Hall at 5.35%. What is not obvious from this data is that a few percentage points have been swapped among the leaders. O’Reilly and Microsoft Press both saw modest decreases while Addison Wesley and McGraw Hill picked up the lost ground.

As you can see in the table below, O’Reilly has the most units, best average Units per title, and best title efficiency rating. It is a relatively healthy mix. That is, we do have quite a few titles and our efficiency is also significantly above the market average.

Sys & Prog - Publisher Market Share (01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011)

Note: This is the first year that I can remember that the PMP book is not the leading title, with McGraw Hill’s title CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition taking the top spot. It might be due to the PMP book having a new edition published in July of 2011 and it needs more time to gain back its momentum. It is also interesting to see that the other top five titles are all 2+ years old and O’Reilly’s two titles are seven and eight years old. Evidence that this is a category where evergreen titles perform well. The leading titles and publishers for Systems and Programming in 2011 were:

Category: Web Design and Development

In this category, you can see that Wiley has the number one spot as a Publisher any O’Reilly has moved into the second spot ahead of Pearson. When we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top five imprints are O’Reilly at 19.84%, Dummies at 16.51%, Wiley at 6.14%, New Riders at 5.35%, and Peachpit at 4.82%.

As you can see in the table below, Pearson still has the most titles but their performance is not as strong as Wiley and O’Reilly in efficiency and units, units per title, and efficiency. In Web Design and Development, we have come back to a state where the market is steady and most publishers are above the title efficiency average of 1.0. As you can see, all publishers except for Apress have an efficiency rating higher than 1.0. F&W Publications might want to consider publishing more with the way they came from nowhere to the number four spot with excellent efficiency.

Web Des & Dev - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011 )

During the past two years combined (2010 & 2011), O’Reilly’s Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript has dominated this category. The leading titles and publishers for Web Design and Development for 2011 are:

Category: Business Applications

In this category you can see that Wiley has the largest market share among the publishers and O’Reilly (apologies: the O’Reilly 23% is obscured in the graph) continued to stay ahead of Pearson for second. If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top six imprints are Dummies at 28.03%, Microsoft Press at 15.94%, John Wiley at 6.45%, O’Reilly at 5.80%, McGraw Hill/Osborne at 5.73%, and Visual at 4.52%.

Bus Apps - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011 )

Microsoft Press’s Office Plain and Simple is the only non-Dummies title to make the top five in this category. Dummies clearly dominates this category. The leading titles and publishers for Business Applications are:

Category: Consumer Operating Systems & Devices

In this category, you can see that Wiley has the largest market share among the publishers with Pearson in second at 27%, and O’Reilly comfortably in the third spot at 17%. (Apologies: the Pearson percentage is partially cut off in the graph.) If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top five imprints are Dummies at 31.38%, Que at 18.88%, O’Reilly at 11.87%, Wiley at 7.54%, and Wiley’s Visual at 6.68%. So when you combine Wiley, Dummies and Visual, you have a publisher that is nearing 50% of the market share.

As you can see in the table below, this is a category that supports a select few big publishers as there are three with efficiencies greater than 1.0. What is impressive with this category, is that it has three publishers averaging more than 1,000 units per title. To me, that means it’s a category that sustains numerous big-selling titles, not just an occasional retail success. As you can see from the best-selling titles below, Windows 7 continues to perform well, but the tablets and e-readers are what is driving this category in 2011.

Cons Opsys & Dev - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011 )

What is impressive with the top-titles list below, is Que had zero titles in the top five in 2010, and in 2011 they have three including the top two. The leading titles and publishers for Consumer Operating Systems are:

Category: Digital Media

In this category, you can see that Pearson continues to hold the top spot, followed by Wiley (31% partly obscured) and then Reed Elsevier displaces O’Reilly for third among publishers. As you can see in the table below, Pearson has the most titles and a relatively good efficiency rating. O’Reilly leads the category with its extremely healthy efficiency rate and average units per title. This is a tough category for lots of publishers because many of the books are four-color and yet low priced. It is hard to make that combination work at a sustainable and profitable level.

If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top six imprints are Peachpit at 16.46%, For Dummies at 15.40%, Focal Press at 14.15%, Adobe Press at 12.08%, New Riders at 9.24%, and O’Reilly at 7.98%.

Digital Media - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011 )

The leading titles and publishers for Digital Media are:

In the treemap view above, which compares the last quarter of 2011 with the last quarter of 2010, you’ll notice balance of green, red and black areas. This pretty much indicates that the last quarter of 2011 was roughly the same as the last quarter of 2010 from the programming languages perspective. Most of the bright green, which indicates rapid growth, is in the bottom right hand corner and small in size. This means there was some growth with small languages in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Before we dive in, let’s look at the high-level picture for the grouping of languages. I have grouped these languages by total number of units sold between 2004-2011. As you can see in the table below, the Large and Major languages were up collectively, and everything from Mid-Major and below was down. However books where the language was the focus, ended up 74,688 ahead of 2010 even though the Mid-Major and below lost -15,120 units compared to last year.

For the sake of grouping and presenting this information in a more readable format, we have classified the categories for the languages in this way with the following headers:

Large

UNITS

TITLES

MARKETSHARE

The following table contains data for the Large languages. As you can see, 6 of the 11 top languages experienced growth in 2011 and were led by JavaScript impressive growth and Java’s continued strength. Objective-C has experienced a second year of declining units but seems to have slowed the decline. What is up with C++? Why is this language still growing? Is there something going on with devices that is fueling the growth of C++?

Here are the top titles for the Large languages:

You’ll notice in the Major languages that Ruby had the biggest growth among this grouping. And the R language had significant growth and surpassed Perl in sales units. Perl used to be one of the largest languages around and is now ranked #19 among the languages. PowerShell experienced it second consecutive year of growth in 2011.

Here are the top titles for the Major languages.

The news in this set of languages is that 3 of the 11 languages saw growth in 2011 so the grouping as a whole is off by about 18.35%. This is partially due to a couple of the languages moving up to the prior category — most notably R and SAS..

Here are the top titles for the Mid-Major languages.

The news in this category is the growth of functional languages, like Scheme, Scala, Haskell, Alice and Lisp. These languages showed a nice 51.38% growth in 2010 and another 11.17% growth in 2011.

Here are the top titles for the Mid-Minor languages.

This category of languages saw 4 of the 7 languages sell more units in 2011. There was roughly a 1.91% increase in units sold year-over-year. The biggest gains were Puppet and Stata. Even if there was only one book per language in this grouping, it would be hard to financially justify a print product because of economies of scale; unless of course the publisher of a title is selling lots of copies direct on their website or direct to corporations or colleges. The combination of digital and print may help some of the titles below this point actually make more financial sense. My experience says anything below this point is not financially beneficial to the publisher or author, yet there may be other reasons they are in print.

Here are the top titles for the Minor languages.

This grouping of languages saw 12 of the 28 languages sell more units in 2011, although the sales volume is fairly insignificant. But there was significant erosion in this group as it collectively saw a -46.96% decrease in units sold year-over-year. I am not going to list the bestsellers, because they are not exactly bestsellers, by any measure, in this grouping. Here is the list of languages selling more than 100 units and less than 1,000 in order by the most units to the fewest:

d, erlang, opencl c, applescript, mathematica, latex, tcl, jscript, minitab, apex, autolisp, pure data, fbml, hla, peoplecode, opengl shader, spin, fortran, pig, silverlight, mel, sparql, kml, linden script, lingo, coffeescript, sml, cobol.

Lastly, the following languages sold fewer than 100 units in 2011. Here is the list in descending order:

abap, blitz3d, octave, nxt, gml, pascal, prolog, ml, chef, x++, inform, cfscript, cfml, racket, boo, jcl, siebel escript, idl, javafx, mvpl, m, verilog, jsl, nxc, limbo, mysql spl, rexx, rpg.

The following languages did not see any units sold in 2011. Here is the list in alphabetical order:

ada, awd, bondi, c/al, cachesql, cl, cs2, delphi, directx, dsl, e, egl, eiffel, go, haxe, maxscript, mumps, natural, ocaml, oopic, opl, pda languages, phrogram, pl/1, q, qbasic, realbasic, s, spark, squeak, windows script, xquery.

Now let’s move past print sales in 2011 — or at least partially away from traditional channels of distribution — to discuss e-distribution. The three charts immediately below are from Bowker, which has recently released its Results Of Global eBook Research. The charts show three interesting graphs about awareness of for-pay content, digital consumption by gender, and digital consumption by age. What is interesting to me is not that Indian males lead the way in both digital downloads and purchasing for-pay content, but rather that more women than men in the U.S. and U.K. are consumers of digital content. It is also no surprise, at least to me, that the 25-34 age group is the most active in consuming digital content.

Awareness of Paid Content

Digital Consumers by Sex

Digital Consumers by Age

Now to take you into the tech book digital market, let’s look at what has happened in the past few years with O’Reilly products. The chart immediately below shows our digital products aggregated into one number and then plotted by year and month. This gives you a perspective of how things are changing. What it does not show is that early digital copies were all PDF files that were pretty clumsy and not as useful. Now we offer our content in virtually any form our readers prefer. So with Mobi and EPUB, we are seeing the less useful PDF decline significantly. But the chart below groups all digital forms together. Only two months in 2011 were not ahead of 2010. Those two months were June and July, which coincidentally coincided with the Borders’ liquidation of physical products.

I also think it is important to look at what O’Reilly customers purchased when visiting oreilly.com. The chart below shows our content mix for the previous two years. The only thing declining in 2011 was our total sales for print products. Rough Cuts are early access editions of our content that are accessible on Safari. As you can see, our ebooks outsell everything by nearly 4 to 1.

What I am not sure exists is a good indicator of what the startup community uses for technical content and books. But if I had to bet, I would wager on ebooks direct from the publisher would be the preferred format in the startup world.

The four charts below show O’Reilly revenue and units growth through oreilly.com. The reason I am showing these is because the same content that goes into our print books is available in various digital forms. It is quite obvious that our customers prefer to shop on oreilly.com for digital copies.

The two charts on the left are showing revenue (top-left) and units (bottom-left) for 2011 exclusively. The two charts on the right are both revenue and units but are showing the trend for the previous four years. From talking with other publishers, this high-growth trend for digital books is indicative of what is happening in the market. The ebooks are just digital versions of our print products. We have not come to a point yet where the digital edition is a native creation that is a blend of live, editable code, video, text, images, links, assessment tools, and other resources all working together. At this point in time, most digital products are typically print books with a few links and some color for good measure. But don’t blink because the tech book market will change quickly to these more blended content types.

O’Reilly Product Mix - Revenue 2011

O’Reilly Print vs. eBook - Revenue Trend

O’Reilly Product Mix - Units 2011

O’Reilly Print vs. eBook - Units Trend

Again, this data is taken from direct sales for O’Reilly and oreilly.com, and may not represent the whole computer book market. One point that was recently brought in discussions at O’Reilly by our VP of online is that O’Reilly is selling more copies of digital editions than any other distributors that carry our digital copies. I think that may be due to the fact that we have DRM-free content that allows you to move your copy of your purchase to another device. For another perspective on DRM, I wrote this for our author newsletter a while back and I still believe that the ideas are sound. Have a look here.

Another key ingredient to understanding what is happening in the digital world is to look at Safari Books Online. Safari is a subscription service with more than 500,000 users. Its main focus is its B2B service that allows developers from many of the largest companies in the world to have access to technical books from most of the major publishing houses and imprints. One notable difference is that the categories with consumer-oriented titles, including the Digital Media titles, do not perform as well in Safari. Developer titles rule in Safari; so as a proxy, Safari may be one of the better predictors of a tech book market. As you can see from the chart to the left, our content in Safari is growing at a nice steady rate. In fact it is safe to say that Safari represents the second largest distribution channel for O’Reilly, with Amazon still occupying the top spot and O’Reilly direct battling for third. It will be interesting to see how the distribution of technical content unfolds in the coming years.

If you look at word clouds for the titles published in 2011 for all books, and the ones found on Safari for O’Reilly during 2011, you notice some similarities. Notably that “Development” and “Programming” are big in both images, but slightly larger on Safari. I was initially not sure why “Control” was so large on Safari, but after a bit of digging I found that Tidbits Publishing has a series called “Take Control” and O’Reilly Media is a distribution partner for them in Safari.

All print titles

Safari for O’Reilly

Thank you for reading these posts. If there is something that you are itching to see / understand more clearly, please let me know and I will try to help. I plan to excerpt updated pieces of these posts on Twitter or Google+ throughout the year. They’ll come from @mikehatora or +Mike Hendrickson and will likely get re-tweeted by @oreillymedia or +O’Reilly on Google+.