Plone Books and Plone Impact

Amazon 

A bit past due, I'm back to Plone Metrics with an update on my almost quarterly Amazon stats. 

The data set continues to grow unpredictably with 13 out of 15 texts that I track reporting sales rank numbers.  The spread between minimum (good) and maximum (not so much) is the largest ever, due to slow sales of Gross's specialized multimedia tome.  Some values are nearly constant, while others show the inevitable decline (increase in sales rank) as Plone 2 textbooks become obsolete.

For the first time ever, there are no books below (better than) 500,000.  Part of that is slow roll out of Plone 4 texts.  Aspeli's latest is included, due out in June.  Below is a chart showing publication numbers for each year since 2004. 

Impact

I had the good fortune today to attend a workshop in Santa Fe on Measuring & Mapping Science.  Many of the concepts have applicability to measures of CMS effectiveness and I'll certainly bringing these new ideas to this blog in the coming months.  While many of the presentations today concentrated on tracking the network of citations in scientific publications, others brought up novel ways of looking at usage statistics.

One important distinction was that between prestige and popularity.  Simply counting clicks, views, downloads, and so forth is a surrogate measure for something's popularity.  But the impact of something must be measured differently to get a handle on its importance or prestige. 

As a first whack at a quick-and-easy impact metric, I turned to Google Scholar to see what sort of journal citations the various CMS's are picking up.  I used the top 10 CMS's from CMS Matrix with the largest numbers of compares. 

The result has almost zero correlation, meaning that importance in terms of who's writing articles about Plone doesn't have any relationship to the number of comparisons CMS Matrix reports. Here Plone (red) has 1300 citations and almost 150,000 compares. 

Google Scholar is just a first cut at a measure of impact--citation counts are only the first step.  The context of those citations now has to be understood to learn what is a positive vs neutral or negative cite.  Because Plone is a very mature CMS, in coming weeks I'll be looking for better metrics of how it has had a significant impact over the last decade in terms of driving the CMS environment by being a leader in innovation, emergent features, and usability. 

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. 

A New Look--A New Year

After fussing around with my blogger template for altogether too long, I've moved on to a new template.  Hopefully, this one is pleasing to the eye and easy to read.

I've taken this opportunity to start off the new year with my quarterly Amazon sales rank statistics.  As is often the case, the values are bouncing around quite a bit.  New titles like Rose's Plone 3 for Education and Williams' Plone 3 Theming are doing well.  Aspeli's Professional Plone Development is still holding its own.  Plone Live (Pelletier & Shariff) is at the top of the graph, but that's an artifact of their online sales that bypass Amazon.  In fact, many Plone titles are published and sold by Packt directly, which probably dilutes their sales ranks. 

CMS Statistics at Amazon

Seems like I just turned around and now three months have passed since I did my last quarterly summary of Amazon sales rank numbers for Plone. Here's the new graph:


Here's the table:

Title	Author	3/1/2009
Professional Plone Development	Aspeli	249,341
A User's Guide to Plone, 2nd Ed	Lotze, et al.	238,151
Building Websites with Plone	Cooper	629,953
Definitive Guide to Plone	McKay	446,029
Plone Content Management Essentials	Meloni	786,631
Content Management with Plone: Handbook for Authors and Editors	Lotze,Theune	832,108
The Definitive Guide to Plone, 2nd Ed	Reale,McKay	1,027,531
Plone Live	Pelletier, Shariff	1,337,175
Plone 3: A Beginners Guide	Knox, et al.	89,753

Tip o' the hat to Knox, et al., where et al. is a who's who of Plone core. This much anticipated new title rolls out the door with a sales rank of about 90,000 and well ahead of the rest of the pack of Plone titles. Nearly tied for second and third are Aspeli and Lotze et al.

However, Plone pales in comparison with other CMS texts. Top-ranked at 3,816 is Angela Bryon's Using Drupal. Nearby at 4,872 is Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website. There are SharePoint titles at 15,000 and 20,000. DotNetNuke for Dummies weighs in at 31,000. But don't feel bad, Web Content Managment for Dummies has a sales rank of only 939,917.

Another way of slicing the Amazon.com pie is to browse down through their categories: Books > Computers & Internet > Web Development > Content Management. There you'll find Cameron Cooper at #11 and Zope: Web Application Development and Content Management at #22. Amazon updates its category listings hourly, so check back at 6:00 AM and it'll be different.

To give you an idea of how much these numbers bounce around, A User's Guide to Plone: Updated for Plone 3 is now ranked 262,229, down from 238,151 when I started harvesting data this evening. Practical Plone 3 has dropped to 99,227. The data is almost to dynamic to be meaningful.

One final thing to look at tonight is what the Plone publishing trends over time have been. Starting with Definitive Guide to Plone back in June, 2004, a flurry of Plone titles hit the shelves. Then there was a long pause before Content Management with Plone: Handbook for Authors and Editors came out. Since late 2006 the books have come out on a fairly regular basis and the pace appears to be picking up.


I realize there's tons of great how-to's and tutorials over at Plone.org, but a great way to support Plone and its authors is to buy their books, even if you just donate it to the public library in your neighborhood. Go to Amazon and write a review. Give 'em a ranking (5 stars would be nice). Pre-order the 2nd addition of The Definitive Guide. Write O'Reilly and Wiley and Sons (For Dummies publishers) and request that they put out some Plone titles. Heck, you might even write your own Plone textbook, but above all, support your local authors.

September Amazon Statistics

Time again for my quarterly analysis of Amazon stats for Plone books. This go-round Aspeli has bounced back from over 200,000 to 18,000. This position is better than any period since March. Remember that decreasing Amazon rank means increased sales volume.

Back in June I said:

With this sudden up-turn, I'd be inclined to think that six months after the Plone 3.0 release and the publication of Professional Plone Development everyone who needed the book has bought it. Come back in Sept. and we'll see if this is a fluke or a continuing trend.

Looks like it was a fluke or the summer doldrums. Sometimes its nice to have to eat your words.

CMS book sales continue to be brisk. I see that Mercer's Drupal book is in the top 1000 (654) and VanDyk & Buytaert's second edition is rated at 1379. One Drupal text is now available for the Kindle.

Speaking of the Kindle, searching Amazon's Kindle Store for "Plone," one finds Magnus Lie Hetland's Beginning Python. I wonder what the Plone-Kindle market is? Please comment if you read this blog and own one.

I applied my "weighted sales rank" algorithm (1/sales rank * 10⁶) as a proxy for sales volume and see that Aspeli accounts for roughly 82% of Plone book sales. Cameron Cooper comes in at 9.3% followed by the smattering of the others. Remember that a large number of Plone books sales may not be tracked due to e-publishing (Plone Live and Plone CM Essentials) and availability online (A User's Guide to Plone).

Once again I'll beat the drum for the Plone community to buy books, review books, write books.

Plone and Amazon

I was looking at my stats at Google Analytics and noticed that a goodly number of people hit this blog searching for my Plone and Amazon statistics pieces. I've been compiling those numbers every quarter since December, but curiosity got the better of me tonight and I dove into Amazon a month early. Here are the Plone and Drupal book statistics:

Author	Reviews	Rating	Sales Rank
Aspeli	10	4.7	48,987
McKay	15	4.1	300,131
Cooper	7	3.7	490,768
Lotze,Theune			587,061
Meloni	9	3.1	588,007
Pelletier, Shariff	5	4.8	1,012,141
	9.2	4.1	Average

Basically, the Plone numbers are declining, which is more apparent in the following graph. Remember, smaller sales ranks mean higher on the Amazon list.



Aspeli's book continues to lead. Due to the scale, its difficult to resolve the considerable fall-off in his sales since this winter. Others continue to slide in the ratings, although Plone Live seems to be holding its own. (Pelletier and Shariff are outliers in the sense that most of their sales are presumed to be direct online from Cygnix.)

My thoughts on this are that this is a reflection on the time that has elapsed since the 3.0 roll out. The average of the reviewer ratings is 4.1, which is slightly higher than the 3.9 average of the Drupal books (not shown).

I can reiterate my conclusions from before: (1) Support Plone authors and buy their books and (2) review and rate them.

I should also mention Alex Steffen's interesting experience, which he related at a One/NW event (see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh3hlU97_wo, 4th speaker, about 27 minutes into the hour-long set of lightning talks).

Alex talks about the fact that with a little coordination among interested peers and social network contacts, one can get a huge boost to Amazon sales rank on Day One. The bottom line is to have more advanced purchases and coordinated Day One purchases on Amazon for the next Plone book. Mercer's new book on Drupal 6 already has a pre-publication sales rank that is excellent. The Plone community can do better. Plone authors take heed.

The Plone Reference Library and Amazon Statistics

I was poking around in Amazon.com recently and realized that it had some numbers that would be worth kicking around. Plone holds up well in the "number of books about it" category (6) for open-source CMS, although Drupal comes close with 4 and SharePoint blows everyone away with 48.


In terms of Amazon sales rank, Aspeli's book is doing well at 40,410. By comparison, SharePoint for Dummies comes in at 17,382 and Pro Drupal Development at an astonishing 6,168. The full set of data from Amazon, looking at number of reviews, customer ratings, and sales rank are:

Title	Author	Sales Rank
Professional Plone Development	Aspeli	40,410
Building Websites with Plone	Cooper	93,139
Definitive Guide to Plone	McKay	139,560
Content Management with Plone: Handbook for Authors and Editors	Lotze,Theune	213,164
Plone Live	Pelletier, Shariff	455,539
Plone Content Management Essentials	Meloni	584,584

Title	Reviews	Rating
Professional Plone Development	5	5.0
Building Websites with Plone	7	3.5
Definitive Guide to Plone	15	4.0
Content Management with Plone: Handbook for Authors and Editors	0	---
Plone Live	5	5.0
Plone Content Management Essentials	8	3.5

By way of comparison, here are the numbers for Drupal:

Title	Author	Sales Rank
Pro Drupal Development	VanDyk, Westgate	6,168
Drupal: Creating Blogs… Websites	Mercer	34,996
Building Online Communities	Douglass, et al.	138,071
Practical Drupal	Mansfield	534,402

Title	Reviews	Rating
Pro Drupal Development	36	5.0
Drupal: Creating Blogs… Websites	16	3.5
Building Online Communities	26	3.5
Practical Drupal	0	---

Interestingly, sales rankings bounce around hourly. "Pro Drupal Development" had a 3,648 ranking last night and this morning it had fallen to 6,168. A couple Plone titles changed places overnight.

Amazon restricts raw sales data to authors and publishers only, so what are we to do with these mysterious "sales rank" numbers? I suggest a figure of merit (FOM) that is one over the sales rank (larger sales rank number means lower sales). One finds that the sum of all Plone sales rank FOMs is 1/6 that of the Drupal total sales rank FOM. This may mean that roughly six times as many Drupal books are being sold as Plone books on Amazon. I should mention that 81% of Drupal's figure comes from a single title, "Pro Drupal Development."

But some caveats are due. "Definitive Guide to Plone" is available free on the Web and "Plone Live" is best obtained by online subscription. These would certainly depress the Amazon numbers. Also, one should take into account how much online documentation is available--better free documentation would mean less need for that reference book on the shelf.

One last statistical pernambulation: take the number of reviews and multiply it times the average rating in number of stars. Plone totals 162.5 and Drupal comes in with 327. Over half of Drupal's total comes from VanDyk and Westgate's book

The oddest statistics were the category rankings that Amazon had. Meloni's book is the last place Plone title and yet it ranks #2 in Content Management. Meanwhile, "Practical Drupal" clocks in a #11 even though it has a slightly higher overall sales rating.

What, if anything, can the Plone community do about this? First, support your authors--buy their books. Second, review their books, rank them, and perhaps most importantly, tag them so that they pop up high in the category searches, especially "Content Management."

Amazon is a wealth of objective data. I'll come back to this data set and look at other CMS at a later date as well as reviewing how Plone texts are moving in the statistics.

Have a Happy and Prosperous New Year!