Computer books

[Christopher Browne]

> You can argue that the big bookstores (which were carrying many of the
> same titles at that time) put them out of business, but even so, it's
> evidently not hugely profitable.

I'd suggest stepping back a little further.

Don't just blame the "big bookstores;" the problem is also that the
_publishers_ haven't been producing much Good Stuff for the last few
years.

Back in 2002, I watched Wrox Press _implode_ just as a book I had worked
on should have started seeing royalties.  The problem was that they got
_way_ overambitious on pushing books on topics of dubious merit at a
time when the IT industry was imploding, thereby chopping away at
potential market.

They wound up killing themselves by pushing way too many questionable
titles through the inventory pipelines into the bookstores.  I did some
technical reviewing, and saw stuff I considered absolute crud.  (I'm
quite sure I was right, too.  Amazon.com reviews were somewhat more
polite than I was...)

They may have been the worst offender, but looking at publisher
catalogues, it has been rough for everyone.

The one publisher I see doing really interesting stuff now is APress,
who are assortedly publishing some of the Lisp stuff that O'Reilly
decided they didn't want to have anything to do with, as well as things
like the book on zsh and Bash (which is rather good).  That "interesting
stuff" isn't being stocked by Chapters, but I don't imagine it would
have been by much of anyone else.  These titles _are_ available mail
order through any of the big names.

I would not blame this all on Chapters; the diversity of titles has
fallen both at the publisher's level and at retailers at large.  In the
US, there's still competition what with Barnes & Noble and Borders, and
in a recent visit, I verified that the computer section at Borders which
was traditionally pretty good has fallen way down.  Still ahead of B&N,
but way poorer than in say 1998.

Online selling provides an outlet for "obscure titles" that it doesn't
make sense for the likes of Chapters, B&N, and Borders to push through
their stocking processes.

For instance, with that zsh book, if 25 crates with 50 copies each sit
in a warehouse in Illinois, to be "fulfilled" by Amazon, they only need
_one_ inventory entry to handle returns if less than 1250 are sold,
whereas if they sent 3 copies to each of 400 stores, there's WAY more
paperwork and shipping to be done because it's almost certain that 3
won't be the right number at most locations.
--
"cbbrowne","@","gmail.com"
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/publications.html
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