THE BIBLE

I was reading a back issue of The New Yorker, dated December 18, 2006, and came across a fascinating piece on Bible publishing in the US.

Titled The Good Book Business it was by Daniel Radosh here is a paragraph that amazed me:

The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time
obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year,
every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the US is a virtually
impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased
some 25 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.

And this:

…other research has found that 91% of American households own at least one
Bible – the average household owns four – which means that Bible publishers
manage to sell 25 million copies a year of a book that almost everybody already
has.

If you would like to read the whole, quite remarkable story from The New Yorker click here.