Wednesday, August 10, 2005, 8:44:13 PM, Marc G. Fournier (scrappy@postgresql.org) wrote:
MGF> The past what? is there a way of seeing last years #s, or the year
MGF> before? To get some sort of 'histogram of sales'?
Yes. It's pretty easy to see current and previous years. Try this. Go
to the following URL:
http://data.oreilly.com/tools/search
I believe you can hit it from outside our firewall.
Type in a title word (or any other search criteria) and hit Search.
You should see some results. You won't be able to drill down from
outside the firewall though (sorry).
Bookscan actually tracks sales back to 2001, but our interface only
shows the current and previous years.
Ruby presents an excellent example of my point about "the past" that I
made in my earlier note, that Bookscan's past results don't
necessarily indicate the future. For years there were just two Ruby
books on the market (at least that made it to the Bookscan list): ours
and one by Sams. Sales were dismal, so of course we didn't want any
more books like that, right? Well, we were so wrong. Along came
Pragmatic, they pub'd a book on Ruby in October of last year, and they
completely blew us out of the water. I'm rather hoping something like
that happens with the book Josh is revising for us now.
Best regards,
Jonathan Gennick
Editor, O'Reilly Media
906.387.1698 mailto:jgennick@oreilly.com