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.