As many of you know, we track the progress of the computer book market via a weekly feed from Nielsen Bookscan, which sends out to publishers point-of-sale data on the top 10,000 computer books (yes, there are that many, and more!).
Recently, we began cheering when we saw the chart below, which shows the computer book market breaking out of a 40-plus week slump, in which every week’s sales were below the corresponding week for the previous year. All of a sudden, in mid-July, sales began to surge ahead of last year:
(The red bars show the comparison to the same week in the previous year. The blue line shows the accumulated comparison to the previous 52-week period as a moving average.)
Not only has the book market been ahead of last year, it’s been breaking out of the consistent pattern it’s been in since we started tracking the numbers and heading back up into territory not seen since 2003:
What was causing the surge, though? We couldn’t figure it out. There were a number of new bestsellers, including our own iPhone: The Missing Manual, Beautiful Code, Programming Collective Intelligence, and Head First SQL, but new titles weren’t enough to account for the change. When we looked at our treemap visualization to see what areas might be driving the market, we saw a sea of green. The market was up across the board:
Then we got this report from Mike Leonard, our retail sales manager:
The August Computer Section sale at Barnes & Noble, as far as O’Reilly and client publishers are concerned, was a success. Total additional sales… [showed] approximately … a 20% increase over the previous period.
This is the first time B&N has ever done a category wide promotion, and the hope was that it would … get the category close to being back on track for budgeted sales…. If other publishers had similar results … this should take some of the pressure off the category, and ensure regular frontlist and backlist budgets for the rest of the year.
As Mike hints at in his report, slow sales at bookstores can have a cascading effect (just as we’re seeing now with hedge funds as a result of the subprime mortgage meltdown.) A bookstore is always balancing its stock for maximum sales. If a category isn’t pulling its weight, the amount of shelf space allocated to it may be reduced. This of course leads to still slower sales, as there is less stock on hand to draw customers into the stores and away from online retailers.
If you wonder whether it matters to publishers whether books appear in stores given that they can be ordered online, try breathing through a straw. You can get all the air you want if you lie low, but you’d better not try any strenuous activity. Retail distribution is like the alveoli in our lungs — it increases the surface area for respiration, except in this case, rather than oxygen binding to hemoglobin, it’s customers binding to possible products to purchase. People go to Amazon and other online retailers with specific purchases in mind. Despite all Amazon’s brilliant work on collaborative filtering and recommendations, a computer screen just doesn’t match up to a physical bookstore when it comes to browsing and the chance discoveries that spark an unplanned purchase.
At any rate, I wanted to give a big shout out to Barnes & Noble for taking the bull by the horns and committing to promoting the category with their big sale. This is a bit like Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, stopping the run on the bank in It’s a Wonderful Life. And, as in that movie, the benefits accrue not just to the company that gets things moving in the right direction, but to the entire community. You see, we can tell from the Bookscan numbers (versus our knowledge of Barnes & Noble’s share of those numbers) that the overall market went up by more than just B&N’s increase. So B&N’s investment in marketing the category helped everyone, not just B&N and participating publishers. (Participating publishers provided half of the discount offered to customers, with the other half coming out of B&N’s pocket.)
This is a good time to remind people of an article I wrote back in 2003 entitled Buy Where You Shop:
If you like shopping in bookstores, remember this: many independent booksellers are on the ropes. (One store owner we know resorts to ordering books on personal credit cards when she is put on credit hold by publishers because she can’t pay her bills.) Even in the chains, computer book sections are in danger of shrinking in favor of other sections where sales are more robust. If you value the bookstore experience, my advice is this: buy where you shop. I buy lots of books online. I read about them on a blog or a mailing list, and buy with one click. But when I shop for books in bookstores, I buy them there, and so should you. Don’t just look for the best price. Look for the best value. And if that value, for you, includes the ability to page through a book, support your local bookseller.
Physical bookstores play an important role in the publishing ecosystem. Smaller sales will eventually mean not just fewer computer books on the shelves of bookstores, but fewer books published. For now, though, Barnes & Noble just averted the run on the bank, and I for one, am all for giving them a big vote of thanks, and that includes “voting with my wallet.”