Atlantic Monthly a senior editor and lead technology writer Alexis Madrigal reports that on Monday, a Bible cracked the top 10 highest-grossing book applications for the iPad for the first time, according to Drew Haninger, CEO of the scripture app’s publisher, Olive Tree.
Madrigal suggests, cautiously, that the burgeoning poopularity of iPhone and iPad Bible applications may indicate that iPad demographics are broadening out the conventional wisdom presumption of a mostly urban, liberal, fairly areligious customer base.
Not a totally surprising phenomenon notes Madrigal, being as the Bible has been a mainstay iPhone book application, and that over on Amazon’s Kindle it rank 50th in their list of best-sellers, with Olive Tree’s NIV {New International Version] Bible BibleReader currently the highest-grossing iPhone Bible, second in books behind Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham.”
Madrigal thinks it’s also noteworthy that the NIV is generally considered to be a “conservative” Bible translation and less likely to be used at more liberal mainline churches that favor the the 1989 New Revised Standard Version which conservative and traditionalist Christians generally dismiss as a politically-corrected revisionist liberal paraphrase. Indeed, The NIV was originally conceived as a conservative response to the 1952 Revised Standard Version. American Catholics lean to the New American Bible.
And while he points out that books represent only a small slice of total app. sales, the succes of Bible apps. perhaps allow us to draw a more complete picture of who iPad users really are, beyond just “selfish elites.”
He also links to a February 22, 2010 piece by the Boston Phoenix’s Chris Faraone entitled “Holy Scrollers!” in which Farone asserts that “the future of e-publishing can be found in one of the world’s oldest books,” and that if you want to see what a 21st Century reading experience should look like… the marketplace you’re looking for is e-Bibles, which at the time of writing represented six of the top 20 most popular paid e-books in the Apple AppStore, with Olive Tree’s Bible Reader is consistently one of the most downloaded free books.
Farone contends that “it is e-Bibles that have helped push technology forward,” musing that “it is somewhat ironic that religious Christians, whose most politically aggressive, evangelical factions are vociferously anti-science, are spurring this evolution,” eclipsing the pornography sector, with Christians now the technology torchbearers, and at least “when it comes to e-Books and the digital revolution, they shall be led by holy warriors.”
“These righteous developers claim to have a lot more tricks up their sleeves,” Farone reports, while “their secular programming counterparts, on the other hand, are considerably behind, and in some cases are checking e-Bibles with their jaws dropped.”
