Thursday, July 5, 2012
CBA Bible Rankings for July
No, not the Catholic Biblical Association, but the Christian Booksellers Association. Each month the Christian Booksellers Association publishes a list of their top ten Bibles by sales and units sold. This list only accounts for those Christian bookstores associated with the CBA, thus excluding any Catholic bookstores, secular bookstores, or places like Amazon.com. I like providing a link to the monthly ranking every once in a while, in order that we can get a small glimpse as to which Bibles are being purchased by our Protestant brothers and sisters. You can view the latest CBA rankings for Bible translation here. It is interesting to note that even with all the controversy surrounding it, the NIV continues to be #1 in this ranking, well ahead of the ESV.
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I am not convinced that the CBA statistics are representative of Bible purchases.
It is estimated that "Before the end of 2012, Amazon could own more than half of the U.S. book business across all formats." Amazon also tends to sell books at a lower price than most retail bookstores, and I suspect that the average Amazon customer tends to read more and have a higher socio-economic level than the average retail CBA shop customer. Because Amazon accounts for such a huge fraction of all book sales, I suspect that Amazon rankings are a much better guide.
In any case, book sales do not necessarily correspond to mind share. First, Bibles can continue to be used across multiple generations, they do not need to be updated the way that world atlases need to be updated, for example. (While the NIV may outsell the KJV, I suspect there are many more KJV Bibles in use than NIVs.) And many Bibles are purchased but left unread.
As a concrete example, I will point to the NRSV. Although this Bible only rarely shows up on the CBA lists, it is arguably by far the dominant academic and scholarly Bible translation in use today.
Would you say this reflects the evangelical community in general?
Would you say this reflects the evangelical community in general?
I think we'd need some more evidence before assuming that. Cokesbury is the second largest chain in the CBA (after Lifeway) but Cokesbury is nominally supported by Mainline denominations.
Consider, for example, the CEB sales figures. The CEB has been in the top 10 Bible sales figures for several months, but when I go to the Bible section of secular bookstores, I do not see it prominently displayed. Cokesbury has been pushing the CEB hard, though.
Perhaps CEB's position on the sales charts is an anomaly caused by the Cokesbury's prominence in the CBA.
We could make similar speculations about the HCSB and Lifeway.
This sort of data is inherently biased, and as such, depending on it is dangerous. A more useful statistic might be gathered by asking people which translation they actually read and how often they read it. (In this way, Bible sales figures are different than car sales figures -- it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of cars sold in the US are actually used. I do not think we can say the same about Bibles.)
I checked the Amazon Best Sellers list for Bibles. It surprised me to find that the Douay-Rheims outsells the NABRE. Does this make any sense?. Am I completely misinterpreting Amazon data?.
Javier
Here is the link to the Amazon list that I might be misreading:
Amazon bestselling bibles
Javier
The 99 cent Kindle Douay-Rheims outsells the $5.49 Kindle NABRE. But that is for those particular Kindle editions only.
My point is I thought the Douay-Rheims to be a rather archeological phenomenon (in editorial terms).
Still, what I gather from that Amazon list is that the 99 cent Kindle Douay-Rheims is the best selling Catholic Bible in terms of copies -be it Kindle or book- , and it is certainly the best-selling Kindle Catholic Bible. And at a confortable distance from the next catholic competitor.
I find it quite amazing.
Sure, but you saw that there were two NABRE editions in the top 40, right?
This one and that one.
I suggest that we want to be careful drawing conclusions from that statistic -- we don't know what the market for Catholic Bibles is -- especially at that low price, I suspect many of those Kindle books are bought by non-Catholics as well. (Buying a single copy of many local daily newspapers is more expensive than that Douay-Rheims.) There is also a difference between buying a Bible and reading a Bible.
It seems like that many American Catholics already have an older edition of the NAB, and may not necessarily feel a need to buy a new edition just yet (just as we do not necessarily throw out our old dictionaries when new editions are released) -- especially when some vocal Catholics have expressed mixed feelings about a few verses in the NABRE.
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