Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007 - (Page 17)

d12lead_p3ma.qxp 10/11/07 10:26 AM Page 17 s moving online. It is being created and maintained by communities of (mostly) volunteers, and being read for free by anyone who knows how to follow a hyperlink. From blogs, online essays, and entire electronic books to vast resources such as Wikipedia, the world has changed forever. At the same time, communities have formed to vet this information, winnowing the wheat from the chaff. From simple mailing lists, to tumbleblogs, to sites such as anachaia and reddit, an interested reader is never short of recommendations.” So, where does this leave the publisher? “Frankly,” Thomas says, “I think that publishing in its current form is dead.” That’s a remarkable statement from a computer book publisher. “Most publishers view themselves as a conduit for information,” Thomas says. “They see their capital value as their list of current and past titles, authors as a resource to be mined in the creation of these assets, and their readers as simple consumers. [They] live in an industry where the power comes traditionally from the ability to choose topics for books, and to distribute these paper books to consumers. So we have publishers who see themselves as a machine for converting authors’ thoughts into paper books, a channel that is an incredibly inefficient distribution system, and booksellers who dislike taking risks. And all of that worked in a world where publishers and distributors were an effective oligopoly.” But the Internet has changed all that. In this new world, Thomas says, “authors are free to create information for themselves—a billion potential readers are just a few clicks away, and they no longer need publishers and distributors to get what they write into the hands of readers. Services such as Lulu even allow these new authors to have their work printed as paper books. Publishing has become an individual, not a corporate, act.” But can computer book publishing really be dead? Wouldn’t we have noticed? It was quite a hit: Grabois cites Simba Information research that shows a drop in computer book sales since 2002 of 17 percent. But he acknowledges that O’Reilly’s numbers are drawn from more sources and may paint a truer picture. O’Reilly’s analysis has the industry shrinking in sales by 20 percent a year from the boom year of 2000 to more or less stabilize at half the 2000 sales volume by 2004. All right, the boom years was just that, a boom year. Computer book sales can be expected to track the ups and downs of the industry. But the past five years clearly reflect something else. Computer books as books are suffering. Grabois says, “Everyone agrees that the computer books category has to reinvent itself to adapt to changing times.” Pragmatic Bookshelf takes a dramatically different approach to the processes and the economics of book publishing, but Thomas readily admits “that’s just a stop gap—we’re simply removing inefficiencies from the legacy publishing system.” The Dummies series and similar appeals to the masses were an attempt at a serious redefinition of the field, but Grabois wonders “whether its current embrace of the mass market of lay users will be enough to offset its considerable losses in the professional sector.” The professional sector? Tim O’Reilly, I believe that’s your cue. O’Reilly surrogate Mike Henderson sees Web 2.0 and digital media books pulling the industry part-way out of a deep slump. “In the first quarter of 2007, we hoped that the Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 releases would cause a similar sharp increase in our trend lines. That has not materialized, and in fact, you could say that Microsoft’s new releases have not lived up to expectations yet, at least for book sales.” Early 2007 numbers did not match the 2006 numbers, and “the market slump is broad-based, and that new categories like Vista and Office 2007 aren’t enough to offset the overall market decline.” Are there any bright spots in computer book sales? Henderson: “Ruby on Rails has continued its blazing growth…Agile is a category that is growing and one to watch…Python is also experiencing good growth…We see a large increase in the category of .Net programming [especially] MCTS certification, WPF, and WCF…I expect [Photoshop] to be a huge growth category by the end of 2007…” And that’s about it. It’s no surprise that Henderson singles out Photoshop books. The top-selling computer books on Amazon in recent years have frequently been Photoshop books. Grabois says: December 2007 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal Dumbing Down Publishing consultant Andrew Grabois, who writes about computer book publishing for Beneath the Cover (www.beneaththecover.com), put it more modestly in a recent report: “Computer books have taken a hit over the last five years.” (You’ll notice that he highlights the same five-year window as Thomas.) 17 http://www.beneaththecover.com 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

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