Book numbers and Lua list community size

["Robert Osfield" <robert.osfield@...>]

Hi All,

This post is likely to be only answerable by the Lua core developers, and perhaps they might prefer not to publish such information, but being a friendly open source community I thought it would be information that others too would find interesting so I'd though I'd just the post questions to Lua list  ;-)

My questions are:

   How many copies of "Programming in Lua" have been sold, and over what period.  Was there a burst of purchases when it was first released?  Or have you
   seen a steady or climbing rate since the first edition?

   What is the Lua community size?  How big is Lua list?

The reason for asking these questions are primarily to scope out the economics of publish books associated with open source projects.  

As some might already know, I'm the lead for an open source project (OpenSceneGraph) that is probably has a similar community size to that of Lua, looking at the activity of the Lua list vs osg-users.  The osg-users list has just shy of 1500 developers subscribed to it, and averages out at around 1000 posts a month.   The OpenSceneGraph project doesn't have a book though, its been talked about many times, and we've even had a few stabs at it, but alas development (commercial and non commercial) work has always overwhelmed us.  

However, we are gearing up once more to get a book written, perhaps we'll even end up with several in years to come, so it it be wonderful to gain some insight from those have gone there before.

Thanks in advance,
Robert.