Click below for Web-exclusive Computer Book Listings:
Adams-Hall to O’Reilly/Missing Manuals
Pearson Technology Group/Addison-Wesley to Wiley/Wrox
Don't look now, but your computer is mutating. That's not a science fiction film scenario; it's a statement of fact. As the number of computers has grown, their usage has widened. Today's home computer (and a computer can be found in more than 60% of homes in the U.S., not to mention the PDAs, BlackBerries, cell phones and other mini-computers Americans now routinely carry) is a jack-of-all-trades.
With increasingly prevalent high-speed connections, home computer users pay bills, download files (legally or not), read blogs, watch movies, listen to music and stream audio. As Philip Ruppel, group publisher at McGraw-Hill, says, "Pretty soon your Treo will be able to order you dessert." Publishers are trying to keep up with the curve of invention by offering books that explain how to use these devices in their new capacities. "In the 1920s, there was probably a book on using your dishwasher," Ruppel observes. "Now people know how to use it. People know how to use computers, but the question is how they can use computers better."
Category Rebooting
This development could not have come at a better time for the computer book publishing industry, which has fallen on hard times since the tech boom of the '90s. The shift to books targeted to laypeople, or "end users," is compensating at least in part for the sharp decrease in sales to professionals, such as programmers. Such professionals have evidently become unwilling to buy books on their own dimes. "Since the crash, people have not been nearly as optimistic and as aggressive," observes Manning Press publisher Marjan Bace. "Logic would say that if you're insecure about your position you should learn more, but they don't know what's going to happen, so they're holding back and not buying as many books."
For their part, many corporations now develop proprietary software and generate documentation for it in-house rather than purchasing supporting books, reports Ellen Greenfield, in the mainframe computing division of Morgan Stanley.
In a weakened field, consolidation is ongoing: Wiley purchased Wrox two years ago and completed its acquisition of Sybex in June, and in mid-July Thomson Delmar Learning announced it was buying Charles River Media.
The combination of a new focus on end users and the thinning of the field seems to be stopping the market's freefall. O'Reilly Media CEO and publisher Tim O'Reilly reports in-house statistical analysis shows sales sank 20% year-to-year for the last three years, a situation he calls "fairly punishing," but for 2005 that analysis shows most weeks ahead of 2004.
Wiley executive group publisher John Swadley echoes those figures, noting a 20% year-to-year decrease for the same period, followed by newfound stability in 2005. Microsoft Press reports that so far in 2005, sales have been flat or slightly up year-to-year for the first time since 2000.
And McGraw-Hill's Ruppel, too, says the hemorrhaging has been staunched: "I won't say there's great growth, but we're not seeing the decline we had in the last several years."
The Next Big Thing
For the time being, the expansion via inclusion of consumer electronics subjects is enough to prop up the category, but sooner or later, publishers agree, something will come along with enough impact to reconfigure the category entirely, the way the World Wide Web did when introduced in the early '90s.
The question is, what?
At one time, a new version of popular software or a new operating system could generate growth, but now it requires a big idea—one that makes much previous technology obsolete—to stimulate a power surge.
Wiley's Swadley compares such sea changes to the switch "from the industrial revolution to the information age." Ethan Goldstine, a principal at kapow (www.kapow.com), a Los Angeles Web design and development firm, suggests that user-contributed content, such as the videos viewers submit to Al Gore's Current TV Web site (www.current.tv), may catch on and give rise to new, currently unimagined technologies, as may further utilization of cell phones. Other potential developments range from Internet telephony (already on the upswing) to more responsive programming tools such as Ajax (see offerings in our listing from Apress, Manning and O'Reilly).
Which of these technologies will win out—or whether something else entirely will rise to the top—is anyone's guess. That there will be books published to support its usage, however, is a given.
