Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007 - (Page 16)

d12lead_p3ma.qxp 10/11/07 10:26 AM Page 16 Strategic Vision by Michael Swaine Reading Between Computer Books The Lines Book publishing has been turned upside-down—and back 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. It’s Dead, Jim 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 16 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l December 2007 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007

Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Computer Books: Reading Between the Lines Conversations Query Anything with SQLite XQuery Web Maps with the Google Map API OpenALM and Its Manifesto Transactional Programming Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.