Book Sale Trends
Based on data from Neilsen Bookscan, which aggregates point-of-sale data from about 70% of US bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and many smaller chains and leading independent bookstores, computer book sales, which have been falling by about 20% a year since 2001, have stabilized, and started to climb again. O’Reilly’s internal market research group has built a MySQL data mart containing the Bookscan data since early 2003, and uses it for visualization and trend analysis.