I need to have a couple specific things answered:
1) Number of new book sales domestic and worldwide the past 50 years.
This can be a couple data points but at least enough to formulate a
graph showing trends in books sales. The goal is to show what affect
online book sales had on new book sales.
2) Number of used book sales domestic and worldwide the past 50 years.
The goal is the same as above--have enough data to formulate a graph
showing trends in book sales. With the goal being to show what affect
online book sales have had on used book sales.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 15 Nov 2005 16:47 PST

ucbadam-ga,

Haven't come across any long-term statistics that would meet your
needs for either new or used books.

However, a possible alternative -- at least for new books -- is to use
the number of new titles that show up in Books in Print for a given
year.  Books in Print contains millions of book titles, spanning a
very long time period.

For instance, here are the trends from 2000 back to 1950:


2000 -- 782,043  new listings in Books in Print

1995 -- 557,640 

1990 -- 349,892

1985 -- 205,577

1980 -- 131,373

1975 --  86,199 

1970 --  58,230

1965 --  13,275

1960 --   5,416

1955 --   3,325



If this looks useful, let me know, and I can fill in the record with
the data for 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004 as an answer to your question.

And if that doesn't work for you, perhaps you can suggest another alternative.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

pafalafa-ga

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Clarification of Question by ucbadam-ga on 16 Nov 2005 07:14 PST

Hi pafalafa-ga,

Unfortunately number of books in print per year won't prove the point
I am trying to make. The goal for me is to find the sales metrics of
new and used books over a  significant range of years in order to
prove the following hypothesis: we believe that the introduction of
books for sale on the internet (Amazon.com, eBay)in 1995 and the years
beyond that caused there to be a significant volume increase in
domestic new and used books sold.

Thanks for your help so far and let me know if you need anymore
clarifications. I know it is difficult to find this data, but even 10
or so data points with more being recent would allow me to plot it and
make very clear the inflection point