Bookscan – Week Ending 8/28/05

A few readers were curious as to how the publisher market share changes when you look at more than just the top 50 titles. Here’s a snapshot of how it looked for the top 750 titles for the week ending 8/28 (by units sold):

1. Pearson/Penguin            34%
2. Wiley                             27%
3. O’Reilly                          17%
4. Microsoft Press              11%
5. Osborne/McGraw-Hill        5%

See there…I’m willing to show data cuts where Wiley isn’t in the #1 position. As I’ve mentioned before, these numbers change from week to week due to promotional activities, new releases, etc. It’s generally a tight race between Pearson and Wiley for the top slot. Pearson is just coming off a promotion at one of the key brick-and-mortar accounts, hence the 7-point advantage. Check back in around Dummies Month or one of the other Wiley promotional periods and you’ll often see these numbers flip.

I would offer to show the same sort of information by topic area, but that would mean I’d have to manually code all 750 titles. I like this blog and all, but I don’t have the time for something like that. Unfortunately, the coding that exists in the raw data file isn’t all that useful for this sort of analysis. Keep an eye on the O’Reilly Radar blog though, as they have done a lot of Bookscan recoding and occasionally share the results.