Bibles are cheap and plentiful in America. Right now anyone can purchase the entire Bible in paperback for less than the shipping costs on Amazon.com, or walk into any church or hotel and simply get one for free. According to a 2001 Gallup poll, the average American household contains four Bibles.

But unlike fast food, which is also cheap and plentiful in America, and is changing lives with record proportions of obesity among the general public (pun intended), Bibles everywhere don’t seem to be making much of a difference. About the same number of people who attend church weekly read the Bible during the week (45 percent), according to researcher George Barna.

Women’s Bibles, men’s Bibles, student Bibles, even software Bibles or the Bible online have not increased the numbers of people reading what remains as the bestselling book of all time.

Olive Tree Bible Software provides even more access to the Bible for Palm OS, Pocket PC, Smartphone and Symbian cell phones, and BlackBerry devices. They also provide Web and online cell phone (WAP) Bible search engines. 

Zondervan will release the TNIV Audio Bible for iPod in February 2006.

"To be able to carry and access the entire text of the Bible in a device that fits in the palm of your hand will be a great convenience to allow time-starved people to read or listen to the Bible whenever it suits them," said Mark Hunt, vice president and publisher of new media for Zondervan.

Hunt brings up two ideas here that bear addressing. First, what about this idea that people are "time-starved?" We all make time for what we value most:

According to Church Volunteer Central: "We all have the same amount of time in a day, a week, a year. The issue isn’t a lack of time. … We all make time for what we value most."

Maybe if we only had to make 24 hours it would help. The new Light Speed Bible from HCSB offers the "time-starved" a way to speed read the Scripture. This book claims that anyone with a seventh grade education can read the entire Bible in 24 hours. Forget about the one-year plan, this plan is aimed at the estimated 75 percent of Americans who have never read through the entire Bible. Will cutting the time it takes to devour the Scripture help?

Reading the entire New Testament one night as an undergrad at Cambridge University revolutionized Nicky Gumbel’s life.

"I started at the beginning and read it straight through," Gumbel told me in a recent interview. That reading instigated not only his new life in Christ, but an eventual career change from lawyer to minister, and then the world-changing ministry of Alpha.

Maybe a fast read of the Bible will change other lives. Maybe a fast listen on an iPod will help. Most Americans are not readers anyway.

According to http://parapub.com/statistics/, 58 percent of the U.S. adult population never reads another book after high school. Even 42 percent of college graduates never read another book. And educated or not, 80 percent of US families did not buy or read a book last year. Some 70 percent of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

Is this part of a large cultural shift from the printed Word back to an oral Word?

Dr. David Sills, an associate professor of Christian Missions and Cultural Anthropology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has worked on the orality issue for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. He spoke at the Global Missions Health Conference at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Ky., Nov. 10-12. He pointed out that only 20 percent of the global population is literate and the rest of the world is acculturated orally.

In fact, Sills said, "A lot of people in our own country now prefer to receive information through oral means, talking to people, etc."

This is a major shift in terms of Bible translation. See www.talkingbibles.org, or www.audioscriptures.org.

Sills recounted statistics indicating that of the 6,913 known languages in the world, 411 have a complete Bible, 1,068 have only a New Testament, and many have only portions. (Other statistics indicate up to 2,355 languages have the Bible.)

The more important statistic he said was that 70 percent of unreached ethnic groups are pre-literates and that 75 percent of evangelical churches are located in the 20 percent of the world that is highly literate.

"We’ve got to change our tactics if we are going to be effective to these [illiterate] people," Sills said.

I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he was talking about us Americans, too.