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.
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.
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.)
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.
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