121–130 of 143 posts
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In my experience friends and family often tend to want to be given copies—which they may or may not read.
That only means that sales aren't your forté. Good friends and family members can be sold many copies each — which they may or may not read.
My car broken, so I had to take a long intercity bus trip, for the first time in 15 years. After a short stop in a station, the driver ignited the bus again, but he forgot to turn the internal lights system on - so I couldn't read. I waited a few minutes, but he didn't turn it on, so I had to get up to ask him in the cabin. Coming back, that's when I realized mine was the one and only light on: none of the other 100…
The whole 2% makes 95% of all revenues doesn't just apply to books... it certainly is true for the video game industry, and I suspect, most of the industries being sold online.
I forget if there’s a term for this, but I once read (and subsequently discovered) that a large portion of disagreements are simply because people are working with different definitions for things. This seems like an example of that: depending on how you define “book” these claims are accurate or not.
My car broken, so I had to take a long intercity bus trip, for the first time in 15 years. After a short stop in a station, the driver ignited the bus again, but he forgot to turn the internal lights system on - so I couldn't read. I waited a few minutes, but he didn't turn it on, so I had to get up to ask him in the cabin. Coming back, that's when I realized mine was the one and only light on: none of the other 100…
Audiobooks are the new travel book. I'm old school and like reading my books, but everyone else I know consumes them as audiobooks the majority of the time.
My father wrote technical books through the 80's and 90's. I remember him being very happy about a book that sold in the low tens of thousands of copies (I'm guessing 20k or so). I know some of them flopped. Even as a child I knew that it did not make sense financially... stay up til 4am writing for a solid year or more (he had a regular job as well), so that you can get maybe 5-10% royalty on something that likely w…
You don't write tech books for the royalties, you write them for the consulting opportunities they lead to.
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Actually I think the post highlights that even the statistic you quoted means less than one thinks it means. For example, some of the books included may have been only a few weeks on the market. Some titles may be niche books with the expected lower sales volume calculated in the price. BookScan only covers a certain percentage of print sales in the US, the total sales could be more than double that.
No it's a very good stat, I think they mean measure after 52 weeks, and note they exclude self published books, it's the crème and still suffers from huge Pareto (as expected)
“Collectively, 45,571 unique ISBNs appear for these publishers in our frontlist sales data for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022).“
Both descriptions mean books sold for 1 of the 52 weeks would be included. You would need to see how quickly sales spike and fall off to see how much those statistics underestimate sales over a books first year. Similarly they cover 16,000 retailers, however it could be some of these books like say textbooks are primarily sold outside of these channels.
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Really? I can't think of any dev I've worked with who didn't at least have some reference books handy. Though to be fair, it's been 10 years or so since I've worked in-person with people on a daily basis, so maybe my impression is just way out of date. I still buy the occasional programming book, but nothing like I used to now that we have all the online resources.
> some reference books handy Looking at a random list [1] of O'Reilly books, I can see 3 categories: - The ones for beginners, like "Learning Python" or "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide", - The ones that will be outdated even before reaching the shelves of a library, such as "Kubernetes in Action" or "Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow", - The ones that are more about concepts such as…
In my experience this is pretty common. Almost everywhere I’ve worked has had some kind of training budget, and most places have had fairly well attended book clubs.
My car broken, so I had to take a long intercity bus trip, for the first time in 15 years. After a short stop in a station, the driver ignited the bus again, but he forgot to turn the internal lights system on - so I couldn't read. I waited a few minutes, but he didn't turn it on, so I had to get up to ask him in the cabin. Coming back, that's when I realized mine was the one and only light on: none of the other 100…
The overwhelming majority of e-readers nowadays have a backlight, right? And reading "electronically" is still reading. But I guess I see your point: reading "traditionally" isn't something that many people do. Just like sitting to listen to an album from start to finish, which is something I did a lot when a was a teenager.