In the Western world we have the spiritual equivalent of the obscene EU wine lakes and sugar beet mountains, a surplus of Bibles. Any flavour (gender neutral or gender differentiated, common language or literary, Madam?) any colour (Burgundy moroccan leather, or trendy teen picture edition, Sir?) you like. It really does not matter, for only one Christian in ten actually reads the damned [swear word reluctantly intended] things!

In the majority world to match their common difficulty in finding adequate and healthy food supplies, or paying for medical care, there are Bible shortages. In Mobuto's Zaïre in the 1980s a cluster of poverty, mis-management and greed ensured that where there were not enough Bibles, basically anywhere far from Kinshasa, though there were handy sellers of bootleg Bibles. If you could pay the markup, you could be the proud owner of a personal copy. It only cost a couple of week's salary...
You'd think that in this Century of the Fruitbat [editor's note: private joke shared only with the other reader of Terry Pratchett ;)] te Internetz would have cured at least this problem. Bible text can be transmitted to any computer screen at virtually no cost (where there is no Internet memory sticks and even old fashioned CDs can serve as vector for the viral Word). In fact with all those phones, soon the Word can reach even the barely literate as audio Bibles freely spread their divine contagion.

Apparently though if the Lusophone Bible Societies have their way instead of healthy "authorised" editions all these viral Bibles in Portuguese will be bootleg Bibles. Illegal copyright infringing pirate editions!

David has to behave himself ;) but you don't hear me laughing (see the comments here) that's tears you hear falling, for the sad, sad story of human sin and pride that holds "Bible Societies" back from actually setting the Word free :(