For a best seller, it's a surprisingly tough read. The language is often obtuse, and some of the characters are difficult to relate to. Even its authorship is in dispute.
But the Bible is the most published book of all time, and its hundreds of translations and manifestations still top the sales charts, year in and year out.
"There is nothing at all out there that compares. The Bible is the best seller of all time," says Michael Maus, communications director for the New York-based American Bible Society, which last year gave away or sold 3.6 million complete Bibles and 7.1 million New Testaments in the United States. Worldwide, affiliated organizations distributed another 20 million whole books or New Testaments.
"In the United States, there are more Bibles than there are people, more Bibles than radios," Maus says.
Precise comparison with other books is impossible because the Bible is like no other text. It is actually a collection of more than 40 books -- the recognized number varies by faith -- written over several centuries, beginning with elements of the Old Testament written hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.
Most of its readers have never experienced its original language. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New Testament in Greek. "Bible" is derived from the Greek "biblos," the word for the inner lining of papyrus bark from which early paper was made. The book has been translated in whole or part into more than 2,000 languages and dialects.
Polls show that readership of the Bible ranks well below ownership, at least in modern times in the United States. And viewed as a literary category, the Bible may be outsold by cookbooks and mystery novels.
A study by the American Booksellers Association, based on a poll of consumers, estimates that religious books as a group represented only 7 percent of books sold nationwide last year. Popular fiction was the best-selling category, with slightly more than half of all books sold, followed by cooking and crafts books at 10 percent, general nonfiction at 9 percent, and then religious titles.
But as a single title, the Bible has no peer.
"The Bible is the best-selling book for the press worldwide," says Hargus Thomas Jr., director of Bible sales and marketing for the Oxford University Press in New York.
