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# Book sales - making data work
- URL: https://www.lorcandempsey.net/book-sales-making-data-work/
- Published: 2005-06-20T08:49:08.000Z
- Updated: 2005-06-20T08:49:08.000Z
- Author: Lorcan Dempsey
- Tags: Books

[![tor.jpg](https://www.lorcandempsey.net/content/images/wordpress/lorcan/tor-thumb.jpg)](https://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/06/the%5Frise%5Fof%5Fope.html?ref=lorcandempsey.net)Tim O’Reilly uses aggregate tech book sales data as a trend indicator. He is looking at the relative ‘popularity’ of programming languages. 

> Last year at OScon, I gave a presentation entitled [What Book Sales Tell Us About the State of the Tech Industry](https://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2004/view/e%5Fsess/5776). One of the conclusions I drew was that [Java was in decline](https://photos15.flickr.com/20051346%5F096a0acebd.jpg?ref=lorcandempsey.net), as its share of total programming language book sales had dropped by five percentage points in the twelve months ending June 2004\. Well, we just re-ran those numbers, and saw a startling reversal. \[[O’Reilly Radar > The Rise of Open Source Java](https://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/06/the%5Frise%5Fof%5Fope.html?ref=lorcandempsey.net)\]