Re: Topic ****ft to What Do Book Sales Tell Us? (from Re: learn.perl.org)

On Sat, Oct 04, 2003 at 06:28:28PM -0400, John Adams wrote:
> I watch the O'Reilly Top 25 Bestsellers list fairly carefully, and have 
> been somewhat disturbed to see that Learning Perl Objects, References 
> and Modules barely hit the list for a week or two, then dropped off. 
> That surprised me--I assumed there were a fairly large number of Perl 
> users at exactly the right intermediate level for that book to be of 
> interest to them.
> 
> So why didn't that book sell better? 

That's a concern for the publisher (and the authors), not for Perl.  For
example, we don't know if the book is missing or meeting sales goals,
which is a *much* more im****tant question to be asking.  It very well
could be that this book is exceeding sales projections yet not finding a
place on the top 25 because the other bestsellers are so damn strong.

Presence or absence on the O'Reilly bestsellers list doesn't mean much
as a single datapoint.

Z.