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Bible fact of the day
Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles—twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars.
That is from a fascinating article about the economics of Bible publishing.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 14, 2006 at 06:14 AM in Books, Religion | Permalink
Comments
I don't find this unusual at all. My own family has purchased, over the last year, at least half a dozen Bibles of different sorts. My wife and I both have three different translations we use regularly. We each purchased the ESV translation within the last year. My wife purchased two, one larger edition, and one pocket-sized edition to keep in her purse. We've also purchased two Bibles for kids in our church's youth group. Since my wife is a language person, and understands Greek, it's important to have that Greek/English New Testament. She also reads Hebrew, so she has a Hebrew Old Testament. I've got a few copies of Ender's Game to loan out, but that's got nothing on the number of Bibles we have.
Posted by: Lockjaw the Ogre at Dec 14, 2006 9:06:48 AM
I tallied these up for a post on this article elsewhere, but I currently own a total of five OT/NT English bibles, a Latin OT/NT, a Hebrew OT, a Hebrew/Dutch NT. Plus an assortment of specialty partial translations (e.g., the Book of J, volumes of the Anchor Bible, etc.) My wife has 2 or 3 bibles as well.
There are also significant volumes of non-personal bibles purchased (consider all those Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms).
Posted by: don Hosek at Dec 14, 2006 12:11:22 PM
I just read some similar statistics in a recent Opinion Journal piece called "Bibles are Booming". Apparently Bible sales are a huge growth industry right now with many types of Bibles with different features being published.
Did you know they even have a Bible for porn stars? Follow the link to read a post and see an ABC News video on this. (Very clean content.)
Posted by: Brian Hollar at Dec 14, 2006 12:36:01 PM
The permanent resident of the top of the NYT fiction list.
Posted by: Arthur Washington at Dec 14, 2006 3:41:49 PM
If Harry Potter, or any other publication, had the legions of insitutional bulk buyers that the Bible does, sales might be comparable or higher. In spite of the anecdotes above, one must wonder how many individual end-user purchases there were of the book.
Posted by: Martin at Dec 14, 2006 7:20:51 PM
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