On any given day, more people are downloading the Bible than the wildly popular Angry Birds app. Still others are downloading the Qur’an: Qur’an Majeed even comes with audio recitations. The top-selling LDS Scriptures for Mac conveniently contains both the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

And you can read the Torah on your iPad or the Tanakh on your iPhone; the Jewish Publication Society has the Torah and commentaries available for e-book.

The rapid adoption of mobile media devices is requiring publishers to act quickly even as technology entrepreneurs churn out version 2.0, so if there isn’t an app for that, wait and there will be. Here’s a look at different players riding the digital wave.

The Common English Bible

The Common English Bible, a new translation developed by a consortium of five American Protestant denominational publishers, was begat by technology every step of the way, which speeded up the labor-intensive task. The CEB was built with an online project management database, used software tools for translation and readability, and developed extensive tagging to help readers search for terms. The complete Bible first debuted online and on 20 digital platforms in June, and came out in paperback in July.

The tech-friendly nature of the Bible and the robust digital market for Bible content has brought a steady stream of product developers to the CEB for permission to license it. “Someone asks every week,” says Paul Franklyn, associate publisher. It helps that the CEB is highly visible in cyberspace, considering how new it is. A search on Google for “Common English Bible” turns up more than two million hits. “There’s definitely a viral effect of having a digital Bible,” Franklyn says. “Mind share is spreading significantly because of this translation being available digitally.”

Zondervan

Two years ago the evangelical Christian house unplugged its proprietary Pradis software in what Chip Brown, senior v-p and publisher of Bibles, calls a philosophical sea change. The new strategy: ubiquity. “If there’s a device you can read, we want to be there,” Brown says.

The recent update of Zondervan’s bread-and-butter New International Version Bible translation has given it fresh material for e-books and apps, and the e-book NIV version has regularly appeared on top 10 bestseller lists tabulated by different e-bookstores. For those who want notes and other resources for study (around half of Bible purchasers do), Brown says an NIV Study Bible app with the updated translation will offer both reading and study modes. It will also contain some exclusive multimedia content, promises Chris Tromp, senior director of digital marketing.

Zondervan distributes Glo, a multimedia Bible named 2010 Bible of the Year by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. Developed by Immersion Digital, Glo is moving onto a variety of mobile platforms. USA Today named it one of the coolest book apps for fall, and a forthcoming premium version will contain more social tools, which Bible publishers are striving to add as they refine their digital products.

Crossway

The English Standard Version translation that Crossway debuted in 2001 was published online and in print simultaneously, with online access free. Since then, digital versions have multiplied as technology has evolved. The ESV is available in Web apps, mobile apps, and e-book versions. The basic ESV text is free, while study apps are not, since apps are more complex products that allow users to perform or to access a variety of things. An ESV study-plus app allows for note taking and streaming audio.

Tyndale

Blaine Smith, associate publisher for Bibles at Tyndale, laughs when he is asked about the digital frontier in Bible publishing. “It’s the Wild West,” he says. But things are shaking out. “In the last 18 months, it has started to gel for us how we need to manage and take advantage of the opportunities,” he says.

Tyndale is producing both e-book and app versions of its Bibles using its New Living Translation. It has some study Bibles for e-readers, “but the navigation starts to get clunky,” he says. “We are maximizing capabilities on the e-book platform, but on the more complex Bibles, you have to go to apps.” Capability, however, is a moving and improving standard. The Kindle Fire, which burst on the market in late September, boasts enhanced capabilities.

As the publisher adjusts to the new digital imperative, Tyndale has changed how it develops its digital products. The publisher is moving from licensing its content to skilled developers, to developing some things in-house or working directly with an outside partner but keeping ownership of the digital product.

It may be a wild and woolly time, but Smith is optimistic about the relationship between digital and print sales. “The exciting thing for us is we are not seeing this as threatening,” he says. “People are willing to buy both print and electronic, and they’re willing to buy electronic multiple times on different platforms.”

Thomas Nelson

Nelson is digitizing its Bible products and developing a process to release digital and print editions simultaneously, says Gary Davidson, senior v-p and Bible group publisher. It is also working with various e-readers and developing future apps using an outside firm. An app for Nelson’s Word of Promise Bible is doing very well, Davidson says; others out now include apps for the Lucado Life Lessons Bible and The Voice New Testament.

Oxford University Press

Oxford publishes Bibles that serve the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant markets. Most of them are print study Bibles for the academic market. Brian Hughes, senior marketing manager, says students are choosing print texts, at least in Bibles, despite the assumption that the young are the most digitized audience. He observes that a Bible is a text that requires different handling in academic study. E-readers aren’t the best platform for a text with many different annotations, references, maps, and other explanatory resources. “With a study Bible, students are flipping [pages] back and forth,” Hughes says. “When you’re dealing with so much study apparatus and further reading, [e-reader] suppliers are not really able to have [the needed hyperlink capabilities] down.” The publisher has seen the highest percentage of e-book sales in its trade history titles, where e-reader hyperlinking helps the reader easily navigate to end notes.

Oxford’s forthcoming Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Nov.), will appear in print and e-book simultaneously, one of the publisher’s first Bibles to do so. “We’re going to see how the e-version sells in tandem with the print,” Hughes says. The house anticipates engaging both academic and general readers for the landmark text, which brings a Jewish perspective to the New Testament. The New American Bible Revised Edition, the Catholic translation approved by the U.S. Catholic hierarchy and published earlier this year, will appear in an e-book version from Oxford in January.

B&H Publishing

B&H’s new Life Essentials Study Bible (Oct.), which uses the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation, comes with a built-in Bible teacher. In the text of the physical Bible are QR codes (those black-and-white patterned boxes readable by smartphone) that help a reader connect to video or audio material featuring Bible teacher Gene Getz, who has taught at Moody Bible Institute and Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also pastor emeritus at Chase Oaks Church in Plano, Tex.; president of the Center for Church Renewal; and host of the daily radio program Renewal.

“It’s mind-boggling,” says Getz, who wasn’t sure what a QR code was when the idea first arose. He illustrates its potential by recounting a recent visit to pastors in India. “I look at these guys, and half of them had smartphones. If [a pastor] is teaching Genesis, he can connect to the QR code and access it to help him prepare his message.” The codes link to more than 250 hours of material.

Software Makers

For this digital Bible explosion, you can thank (or blame) a number of companies who have been doing this for 20 years or more. Olive Tree, a software company in Spokane, Wash., that specializes in mobile devices, has been growing by 30%–40% a year, says president and CEO Drew Haninger, and it’s now heading in some new directions. While others get mobile, Olive Tree will add desktop and online software. “The desktop people have moved to mobile slowly, and we said we’re going their way,” Haninger says. The reason? Many people use more than one device, so adding more platforms allows customers to stay with one brand and synchronize their devices to access the same material no matter which one they use. Olive Tree is also bulking up its religion reference and trade book offerings. The company just signed contracts with Thomas Nelson, Zondervan, Baker Publishing Group, and Wm. B. Eerdmans to license 2,000 more titles to add to its database.

Logos Bible Software is also evolving as the computing environment changes. It rewrote its desktop software to develop a mobile, cloud-based product in late 2009. Bob Pritchett, Logos president and CEO, says it was “hugely successful. The bad news is it dramatically increases costs.” Logos has expanded to include trade books and sells them at Vyrso.com, which contains 5,000 titles that can be read using a free reader app. They are now getting customers beyond serious Bible students, says Pritchett. “We’re building an ecosystem for Christian content, digitally.”

Will all this digital publishing relegate the black leather-bound Bible to the dust heap of historical artifacts? Paul Franklyn of the Common English Bible doesn’t think so. The physical object has significance as a religious artifact, he suggests; most people don’t use their iPad to pray. “Jews and Christians are called ‘the people of the book,’ ” he says, referring to Muhammad’s name for those believers. “That’s a metaphor I don’t think is going to shift to ‘the people of the screen.’"

The Digital Gideon's Bible: YouVersion

Some publishers grumble quietly about the digital 800-pound gorilla: YouVersion. It’s a Bible app developed by LifeChurch.tv in Edmond, Okla., available both online and for mobile devices, that offers more than 150 different Bible translations in 45 languages. At press time, it was expected to reach 30 million installs, according to Lori Bailey, LifeChurch.tv director of communications. Because it’s supported by the church and foundations, it’s free.