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How many Bibles are in existence, at libraries, warehouses, bookstores, etc.? Also, how many are being produced annually? I am primarily interested in the United States, but a worldwide figure would also be appreciated.
In many nations Bibles are hard to come by, because owning even a single page is cause for imprisonment and torture.
The latest from Barna Research says there are 4.7 Bibles per household. An interesting New Yorker article (about how publishers love printing new editions of the Bible) touches on the difficulty of estimating such figures, but gives the printed-per-year number as about 25 million. I'm sure that difficulty would be greatly compounded for international figures given the variety of versions, languages, illegal copies, etc. At any rate, I couldn't find any reliable sources with worldwide figures, but the websites that I have found with figures seem to put it in the .5 to 1 Bible per person ballpark.
