Authors often ask me about how the computer book industry as a whole is doing. Fortunately, Tim O’Reilly recently did a thorough analysis of how the industry as a whole is performing on his blog and it’s really worth checking out. In the first part of his analysis, which you can check out here, Tim looks at overall industry performance. Here’s a snippet: “While our detailed data only goes back to 2003, we know that 2003 was about 20% lower than 2002, which was in turn 20% lower than 2001. 2004 was then 20% lower than 2003…but that represented the low water mark. 2005 saw a slight upturn, and that has strengthened in 2006, with sell through of technical books in Q1 of 2006 up nearly 7% over the same period in 2005.” We’ll have to see how things look going forward for the rest of the year, but that would seem to indicate that we’ve hit the bottom of the market and are on the way back up, if slowly. Tim also provides a really wonderful visual map that breaks the book market down into categories and shows whether technologies are on the rise or waning, at least with regard to book sales. If you take a close look at it you see some very interesting things. For instance, Office, Word and WindowsXP titles are all down. That makes sense given that the newest versions of those products are all about 3 years old, but the data also shows that Excel and Quicken titles are up, which is interesting. Of course, we can expect to see a big spike in Office and Windows titles when the new versions of those products ship, but it’s still interesting to see which titles have held up over the product lifecycle.

The data also shows that Photoshop is up, but Photoshop Elements is down. Java, Oracle, and even Perl are down, but SQL Server is way up, as are things like Javascript, AJAX, Ruby on Rails and the other big Web 2.0 topics. In the second part of his analysis, which you can find here, Tim drills down even further into specific topic areas. Take a close look at it if you have a few minutes. It’s fascinating stuff and should help give you a stronger sense of what’s happening in the market as a whole. And who knows? It may help you figure out where you want to go with your next title.