I'm wondering if anyone here has given thought to the benefit and possibility of having a completely new Authorized Version done. A main problem with the existing versions is that none of them was authorized by the Church, but it seems that various changes were made by various publishers as time went on, which accounts for the chaotic situation everyone is now trying to sort out in the pursuit of the best edition. I've personally decided to get a secondhand copy of the Large Print KJB at Amazon that Brandon/Diligent has recommended, as most likely the best edition out there at the moment, but still it seems that Christians need an edition that is both authorized, as the original King James was, and standardized so that versions won't proliferate.

This has only been proposed, as far as I know, by Douglas Wilson who pastors a Presbyterian church in Moscow, Idaho. He presents the idea here:

http://www.credenda.org/issues/9-4presbyterion.php

Third, we should pray and labor for an ecclesiastical translation of the Bible. This translation and work should begin with the last true ecclesiastical version we had, which was the Authorized Version (popularly known as the King James). At one stroke this would set right the three principle issues involved: the ecclesiastical (the Church distributing Scripture, as opposed to, say, the devil), the textual (the Textus Receptus as opposed to the tossed salad "who's-to-say?" variant readings we get now), and the translational (formal equivalence vs. dynamic equivalence).

He goes on to say

Fourth, the portion of the Church involved with the recovery of the Bible should repudiate, in the strongest possible terms, the Glassy-Eyed Defenders of the King James Version, who are very popular in fundamentalist circles. Such know-nothingism has been one of the principle reasons why the Bible-mongers have been able to get away with rejecting the ecclesiastical text without any serious argument.

I can't claim to have studied the situation in any depth but both these thoughts seem very reasonable to me. There does seem to be an almost superstitious clinging to the original text of the King James in some quarters, that doesn't recognize that a translation of necessity must be done in the language of the culture of the day, as the original was. Is there really such a thing as Bible English? Shouldn't the English simply be the clearest and most exact in order to convey the true meaning of the Greek and Hebrew texts? It is the aim when the Bible is translated into the language of any nation or tribe in the world, to find the best use of the language to render the clearest meaning of the text.

It may be that some of the archaic English of the King James should be retained in any case, perhaps because it just IS more precise, and simply require people to learn it. However, it does seem that mere spelling differences and modern versions of words shouldn't be shunned when they render the meaning as clearly to us today as the originals did in their time. But in any case, all this should be the decision of the Church, not individual publishers.

The way the original King James was done makes a good model for how it could and should be done again. The very best men chosen for their scholarship but also for their godly lives, and many of them, need to be found and appointed again now just as they were by King James. The more the better. Since there is no king to make this decision, perhaps churches of a basic likemindedness should appoint one another to constitute the authority for choosing the translators.

The idea should be to use all the same texts available to the King James translators, and all the subsequent revisions of the KJV, for careful comparison, with the aim to be to come up with the best version for today that preserves all the best qualities of the original KJV. This statement by the original translators seems like a fine model to go by:

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html

Truly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one,...but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against, that hath been our endeavor."

To come up with the best from the good.

It may be that the "high English" of the original should be retained for the most part, as argued on this page:

http://av1611.com/kjbp/articles/flanders-whykjv.html

but again shouldn't that be the decision of many godly heads appointed to the task, rather than publishers or even well motivated individuals?