Christian Retailing

News Beat July 2011 Print Email
Written by Production   
Wednesday, 29 June 2011 03:44 PM America/New_York

Paul Davis, 67, a U.K. Christian music pioneer and founder of New Christian Music (NCM), died from cancer May 6 in a hospice in Leighton Buzzard, England. Doctors discovered a brain tumor in February. A journalist, record producer and broadcaster, Davis wrote several books, including the biographies of Pat Boone, George Hamilton IV and George Beverley Shea. For the last 26 years, Davis had served as lead pastor of Leighton Christian Fellowship—a church he formed with Hazel, his wife of 46 years.    

A 400th anniversary commemorative edition of the King James Version published by Oxford University Press has become a surprise hit with Australians, completely selling out, according to the publisher, who is scrambling to print more copies. With 1,520 pages and a retail price of $120, the Bible is faithful to the 1611 original—replete with arcane prose and more than 350 printing errors.    

A Christian bookstore in County Armagh, Northern Ireland is hoping to reach new customers around the world after launching what is believed to be the first iPhone application for a Christian retailer. One of the biggest Christian booksellers in the U.K., ICM Books Direct has embraced e-commerce and tripled sales through its Web site in the last year.    

The Council of Churches of Malaysia and the Christian Federation of Malaysia have expressed frustration over the repeated detention of Bibles written in the nation’s language, Bahasa Malaysia, in the ports of Kuching and Klang because they feature the word “Allah.” The Malaysian government prohibits the word in Christian publications, arguing that use of the term might cause confusion among Muslims, who make up about 60% of Malaysia’s population. Since March 2009, all attempts to import the Bible in Bahasa Malaysia have been thwarted.