How have the number of books written or sold about personal finance
changed over the last 5 or 10 years?

I'm looking to see if there's a trend that reflects the state of
Americans' financial situation (which I believe is worsening). So the
number published and/or sold for each of the last 5-10 years would
point to that.

Dear Sashen,

for number of published books I suggest you visit your nearest
academic/public library and ask them to show you Global Books in Print
(online). You can then try to play with its Advanced search depending
on what exactly you need the data for or intend to do with it, e.g.:

Search On: Subject - (all)
Search for: personal finance
Limit by publication year, market, and/or country of publication

I did a quick search and got something like this:

	Markets/Published in		
	US/US	All/US	All/All
1999	643	1106	1311
2000	705	1248	1494
2001	833	1401	1694
2002	792	1331	1684
2003	706	1253	1564
2004	828	1232	1537
2005	446	691	932 (not complete year)

Hope this helps a bit :-)

Cheers,

Uko