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The graph below is taken from Nielson Bookscan data, which is considered by the industry to be the most accurate third party book sales data for the US market (the US market being the most important market for web design books).

Although the data on this graph is now obsolete, the graph illustrates the fall in book sales per publisher for Flash books immediately after the dot com bust. As you can see, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

The following is my opinion on the data. Every publisher/writer will most likely have their own spin on this.

The biggest losers were those publishers who clung on to old style books - big bible style editions or reference books that were essentially print versions of the stuff anyone can already get from the web, or teaching books that were academic rather than practical. The sorts of book that held up during the downturn were those that contained information structured in a way that actually gave added value by being formatted as printed books - i.e. books that were meant to be read from cover to cover (taking in much more information than you ever could from a website or TV), or books that were seen as definitive and concise, practical, or just plain prettier in print.

There is also the issue that web design and I.T. in general has moved from a nascent and new frontier to an established industry during the dot com boom-bust period, so the need now is for replacement and maintenance rather than pioneering. This means there is less of a demand to learn new stuff, and the information is easy to come by from multiple sources. Finally, there is the effects on investment that the attack on the WTC caused, and the slowdown in I.T following it.

Although the market has recovered slightly since the timeframe of this graph, there is also the issue of extreme competition and many more titles being published, so the return per title has actually been very low during 2003-2004; 50 to 25% of what it used to be. there is some evidence that this is changing, however, with fewer books been published in 2005-2006.

So why do us authors still write? Well, I can only speak for myself. Rather than being a full time writer who did web design, I am now a full time web designer who writes books. Although I write fewer books, I have a much more immediate exposure to the coal face of practical web design, and I can see how this has made my recent output much more pertinent.

Also, I actually enjoy both writing and designing, because both avoid me having to engage in the thing that least interests me - anything that requires me to take part as the audience. This is not because I like to be in the limelight (far from it - I am not a 'scene' designer by any stretch!), but because I hate 'not doing' and - especially - 'not creating'.

To this end, there are all sorts of new ideas I’m looking at right now. The only trouble these days is finding the time to sleep after fitting it all in… but I count that as a good thing!