Tag: publishing

Bestselling Oracle books and a bit about the biz

Don Burleson has an interesting artucle about some of the bestselling Oracle authors. Perhaps more interesting than the actual list is Don’s comments on how the book market has changed from the 90’s to the 00’s. He also talks a little about how royalties work.

Fair to say that today’s Oracle author (me included) isn’t expecting to get rich from their books, but it remains a great way to increase your personal visibility, give a subject a more complete treatment than it might otherwise get and help ease the learning curve for others who are less experienced.

oracle, technology, book, books, book sales, author, writing, publishing, royalties

25 Best Free Fonts

Vitaly Friedman, a freelance web developer has compiled a list of the 25 best free fonts. Perhaps even more impressively, he continues to update it with license changes and new fonts as they change.

As far as I can tell the only oversight is that there is no monospace font (like courier) represented in the list, but still, this could be useful for some future projects.

fonts, free, freeware, publishing, web development, information technology

Shifting Demand for Database Books

Donald Burleson of Burleson Consulting points out some interesting statistics from Tim O’Reilly on trends in the tech book market.

If we assume that people are buying books because of a market demand, we see Oracle is steep decline and SQL Server book sales up 83%, followed closely by PostgreSQL. We saw this exact same trend in 1992-1995 when Oracle books started to dominate the database book market, displacing DB2 and IDMS/R books.

As a whole, the big news is that database book sales are way-down with the exception of PostgreSQL and SQL Server books, which are up 83% and are now double the size of the Oracle market.

Check out Donald Burleson’s full article

Some of this shift may be due to the recent release of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Dispite it’s small overall percentage, the growth in PostgreSQL book sales is significant enough to keep an eye on it in the near future.

Also interesting is the stagnation of the MySQL book sales, down 2% from last year. With the number of blogs, wikis and other relatively hot technologies running on MySQL I’m surprised this number is down.

In contrast to the book sales, Alexa, which measures a number of statistics to determine rank among web pages, shows increased web ranking for Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL, while showing decreased traffic to Microsoft’s corporate site.

Graph by Alexaholic.com

For the full scoop according to Tim O’Reilly, check out his articles State of the Computer Book Market, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

books, book, tech books, technology, computers, database, dba, database administration, publishing, oracle