

Dive Into 2010: HTML5 Book Reflection - rafaelc
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/01/09/dive-into-2010

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lukestevens
Interesting stats!

14k sales in 6 weeks is great for a tech book (~5k lifetime being the norm),
but on the back of 2 million visitors to the web site, and Mark Pilgrim's
reputation, it illustrates why publishing is a tough biz.

O'Reilly pays authors 10% of net income, which is usually 50% of retail. Given
Mark's book is going for $30 retail and $17.72 at Amazon, that's about ~$0.88
- $1.50 per book for print (for the sake of the argument, let's assume digital
is in the same ballpark). Mark's royalty check for $9225, + whatever advance
Mark got (say $5k?) equals roughly $1/book sale for the author (assuming that
payment was for 14k sales to date). Given it takes 100s of hours to write a
book (and hundreds more to write a good one), making $1 per sale, on average
sales of 5k lifetime, or 14k sales in 6 weeks for a top tier author like
Mark... let's just say technical writing is not exactly something you do for
profit :)

Also of note is the 75%/25% print/digital sales ratio. This would suggest that
the free online version is cannibalizing digital sales, given O'Reilly usually
sells ebooks 2:1 ([http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/does-digital-cannibalize-
pr...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/does-digital-cannibalize-print-not-
likely.html)), but I guess you could make a case that the loss in digital
sales is made up in extra print sales from the book's exposure online.

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MarkPilgrim
Interesting deductions! I just wanted to pipe in here to confirm that your
math and your stated assumptions are correct. My take is the standard 10%. My
"top tier" status, as you flatteringly put it, bought me the freedom to
simultaneously publish the book online under a Creative Commons Attribution
license. I negotiated for licensing, not money. I have no regrets.

~~~
petercooper
Your story provides some interesting confirmations of the points I raised in
my own story of 2009: <http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/>

Despite being approached to do the 2nd edition of what was a popular book (in
its field), my negotiations on the licensing failed and, as anticipated, the
2nd edition has done extremely poorly compared to the 1st due to new
competition and a lack of anyone _serious_ recommending the book because it's
not available in an open format to "scope out." (And as someone who recommends
books, this is key for me. I can't buy every beginners' book that I don't need
merely to judge them for others.)

Your post will serve as interesting ammunition in future discussions between
many authors and their publishers, I suspect, and I applaud you for putting it
out!

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adriand
> 6% of visitors used some version of Internet Explorer. [...] Microsoft has
> completely lost the web development community.

This is something we all know but it's interesting to read another tidbit
supporting that conclusion nonetheless. Not only do web developers avoid using
Internet Explorer, we've been traumatized enough by IE that we actively
evangelize against it.

~~~
tomeast
That was one of the more interesting stats to me as well. Given my IE trauma I
actually read it as 6% as IE6 users but 6% of all IE versions, wow - Microsoft
has really lost credibility with the web developer crowd.

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pamelafox
It's a fantastic book, and probably the one I've recommended most this year. I
used it (the online version) to both learn about the new technologies and also
to prepare curriculum to teach other folks about them. I love how his writing
style combines narration and humor alongside the technical topics. Read it! :)

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andybak
I'm wondering if any conclusions should be drawn from the disinterest in
microdata.

On one level it's to be expected - most interest in HTML5 is coming from
front-end people whilst microdata is of most interest to 'back-end' types (and
SEO bods).

However one shouldn't forget Cory Doctorow's metacrap thesis:
<http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm>

