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Saturday, August 05, 2006

state of kimchi or state of IT book market?

With a few rather nice independent book stores in & nearby SF going out of business, and with me start to look into more technical books inluding linux kernels and ever so popular .NET, I couldn't help but to do a bit of googling(it's officially a word, now, I hear) for 'IT books,computer books, market, sale, analysis'.

Nowadays everybody blogs, and sometimes obsessively, whether on his/her own blog, or as a commentator of some one else's blog.

First, I was pointed to Tim O'Reilly's personal & company blog, tim.oreilly.com way back from 2002 and 2003, with numbers, pie charts, ...

Then, I got to Apress's company blog that gave a few numbers, mainly comparison between Apress, Xrox, Oreilly and few other competitors' sales within last 4-6months.

I have to admit I'm not familiar with Apress as the publisher. That shows I've not been reading new books much, and that shows I've not paid much attention to the books in windows platform, #C or .NET or ASP. I'm pretty impressed with Xrox, at their speed of getting interesting & well written books published timely. O'Reilly is just O'Reilly, it's just been there for as long as I can remember, when I first typed '#!/usr/bin/perl' without knowing I was using perl4 or perl5;and couldn't have cared less.

It's nice to see that people are willing to post marketing analysis and crunch the numbers for public, and it sure is humorous to see Tim O'Reilly himself posting comments on Apress' blog, numerously, too.

As old saying, know thy enemy and know thyself and thy shall conquer 100 out of 100 battles?

The fact that I could fish some of data that would have been expensive, secretive in past makes me wonder. This just reminds me about one of NPR radio broadcast where some book publisher analysts give list of best seller book titles, and how the title of book affects a potential buyer's split second decision of whether to take it off the shelf to take home or not.

Geez, and here I thought book writing was all about writing skills, passion and creativeness.

I see many blogs begin with 'state of onion' or something like that. I ain't no shrek and never did like how spicy it is. Heh, I prefer kimchi!

my state of kimchi: I decree I shall dig up more on this book marketability. I wouldn't be writing best seller 'devil wears prada' or 'da vinci code' any time soon. but, it's a joy to find out how things are done, how the formula works out. hacking hacker books... hmmm... and, nope, i ain't no hacker!!!

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