"Count what is countable. Measure what is measureable. What is not measureable, make measureable." -- Galileo

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Amazon Sales Ranks for Plone Books

It's been a good year so far for Plone textbooks.  New titles have been rolling out steadily.  Packt currently lists 10 plus a couple related titles dealing with CMS selection and Python. 

I should mention that Packt has just opened the floor for nominations for their 2010 Open Source Awards. Get on over to http://bit.ly/deN0Cn and put a plug in for #Plone. You might just win the doorprize of a new Kindle.

Meanwhile, back on topic, Amazon's list of Plone books is several pages long and as usual I've mined the sales rank data. 

As you can see, values continue to bounce around quite a bit.  The overall trends, as one would expect, are for sale rank to get higher (fewer sales) as time passes.  That's simply because people tend to buy books when they first come out, especially IT books, which have a shelf-life determined by the version of software involved. 

The graph is getting pretty busy with all the authors I'm tracking.  The last 3 titles (Gimenez & Romero, Gross, and de Alba) are all new since my last posting, so there is no trending information available.  Stay tuned for next September's data. 

Another set of statistics that I've been tracking are the BuiltWith numbers.  Apparently, they sample a couple million websites and attempt to identify underlying technologies.  Their 10 Aug. graph looks like this:

There's an encouraging upward trend in Plone usage, if you trust their undocumented methodology.  They state that 685 of the top million websites on the Internet use Plone.  They've additionally identified 5,634 other sites in a more extensive survey.