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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 2824175" data-attributes="member: 40166">Where are these numbers coming from? I seriously doubt anyone could give an accurate count of the number of copies of Romeo and Juliet just printed last year, much less accurate numbers of all fiction books over the last couple centuries. Wikipedia says The Valley of the Dolls has sold "more than 20 million copies", and says Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has sold 20 million copies. The <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4300000/newsid_4308500/4308540.stm" target="_blank">BBC</a> says that "The series of books went past the 300 million mark thanks to the publication of the sixth wizardly tale, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", which averages 50 million a book.Where is this from? From the AskMen article, I assume? It strikes me as a particularly meaningless list, in that the McGuffey Readers, the World Almanac and the book of World Records are more serials that change content yearly and are rebought yearly for new content. I also suspect it was compiled haphazardly from numbers easily available to an American audience; most of the numbers are for American books, and not terribly recent ones.</blockquote>