The King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran was established at Medina in the 1980s and is among the largest publishing operations in the world devoted to a single book. It produces the Arabic text in several standard readings, recitations on audio, and translations into scores of languages, and the great majority of what it prints is given away rather than sold, distributed through pilgrims returning home, through embassies, and through mosques and institutions abroad.
The effect on the availability of scripture has been enormous. In many places the free copy from Medina is simply what a Quran is, and for readers without Arabic the accompanying translation is the text they use. That gives the complex an influence over the reading of scripture that no commercial publisher could hold, because a translation is an interpretation at every point where the Arabic is capable of more than one sense, and the explanatory notes that accompany these editions carry positions on law and creed.
That influence is discussed rather than disputed, and the discussion has camps. One reading treats the programme as a work of custodianship in the plainest sense, making scripture available without charge to Muslims who could not otherwise obtain it. Another holds that free global distribution of one editorial line, at a scale no other body can match, has shifted the balance of Sunni interpretation toward the reading favoured in the kingdom, at the expense of local schools of law and older regional traditions. The two readings are not incompatible: a very large act of provision can also be a very large act of persuasion, and both camps agree on the scale.