The earliest Bible society in America (the very first being the Canstein Bibelanstalt in Halle, Saxony in 1710) was the Philadelphia Society, founded in 1808. In 1816, thirty-one such organizations joined together to form the American Bible Society.
The purposes of the Society was to make available low cost Bibles and Bible study materials in English and also in other languages.
By 1839, all of the Bible societies in the U.S. had joined the American Bible Society and by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, it had distributed over 84 million books in over 100 languages.