Bibles

Via Between Two Worlds, an article from The New Yorker titled "The Good News Business" about the Bible publishing business in this country:

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 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.

In some ways, this should not be surprising. According to the Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm, forty-seven per cent of Americans read the Bible every week. But other research has found that ninety-one per cent of American households own at least one Bible - the average household owns four - which means that Bible publishers manage to sell twenty-five million copies a year of a book that almost everybody already has.

The New Yorker slideshow illustrating some of the Bibles on the market.

Source: The New Yorker: The Good News Business