Bookscan -- Week Ending 12/4/05

Here’s a breakdown of the top 750 titles in the computer/tech category for the most recent week:

1. Pearson/Penguin            29%
1. Wiley                             29%
3. O’Reilly                          19%
4. Microsoft Press              10%
5. Osborne/McGraw-Hill        4%

(I hope all my Pearson friends will notice that I listed them first despite the fact that the Pearson and Wiley market share percentages are virtually identical.)

Comparing that to my last Bookscan post for the week ending 10/30, Pearson is down 1 point, Wiley is flat, O’Reilly is up 1 point, Microsoft Press is down 2 points and Osborne/McGraw Hill is down 1 point.

Out of the top 20 titles for the week, Pearson and Wiley both had 6, O’Reilly had 5 and Microsoft Press had 3.

Now that we’re in the midst of the holiday season, the topic breakdown tends to shift around a bit. Office topics were dominant in several of the earlier weeks – this time there are only 3 Office titles (including various Office applications) in the top 20.

The #1 topic by title count in the top 20? Would you believe…Programming? I guess the latest books on Ajax and ASP are popular stocking stuffers. Speaking of ASP, I’m thrilled to see our own Professional ASP.NET 2 comes in strong in the #15 position this week. By the way, that performance has been achieved without the benefit of an endcap placement, “30% off” sale or any other special deal. Congratulations to the author team led by Bill Evjen and WROX editor Jim Minatel.

Comments

[James McGovern]

Maybe you could also show which publishers are on the decline. You are welcome to disclaim the fact that a reader not from the publishing industry inquired...

[Joe Wikert]

Hi James. As you can tell from the list in the original post, all the other publishers not listed in the top 5 have less than 4% of the market share each. So, any decline by them is going to be minimal. The top 5 publishers represented 91% of the entire market, at least for that week. As you can see from my earlier Bookscan posts, the list of the top 4 publishers is fairly consistent from month to month. The more recent trends haven't been so much publishers dropping significant share as they have been publishers swapping a point or two every so often.