Last week the number of people who have bought my ebook Scraping for Journalists passed the 1,000 mark. That is, to me, incredible. A thousand journalists interested enough in scraping to buy a book? What happened?

When I first began writing the book I imagined there might be perhaps 100 people in the world who would be interested in buying it. It was such a niche subject I didn’t even consider pitching it to my normal publishers.

Now it’s so mainstream that the 1000th ‘book’ was actually 12: purchased by a university which wanted multiple copies for its students to borrow – one of a number of such institutions to approach me to do so. 

(And I’m not counting sales in the Kindle Store either, where copies are also available although you don’t get Leanpub updates)

Meanwhile, over 2,200 people have now progressed far enough in the European Journalism Centre’s data journalism MOOC to complete my quiz on scraping in week 2. Again, incredible.

And stories based on scraping techniques now crop up on a regular basis, like this and this, and this and this, and this, and this and this, and the story below from Channel 4 News.

Incredible.