There are a couple of ways that the Bible can become an idol. The first and most obvious one is when it becomes a talisman, when the physical object, itself, is seen as having a sort of mystical value. The only value a Bible has is in the ideas contained within it. The physical object should not be treated as something magical.
Sometimes the words, themselves, are treated as having a magical property, even over and above their meaning. There are people who idolize the Bible by reading the text as a sort of magical incantation, apart from any actual understanding. This one is probably less of a problem, and it's probably the hardest to discern. I timidly posit that the crowd most likely to place undue emphasis on exact words over meaning is the King James Only group. Previously, it was the Latin Only group, also known as the Papacy.
There's a confusion of terms when we call Jesus the Word of God in the same way that we call the Bible the Word of God. It would imply that Jesus is the Bible, and if Jesus is God then the Bible is God. Please don't pray to your Bible, by the way. Calling Jesus the Word of God is scriptural, but calling the Bible the Word of God, if I am not mistaken, is merely a matter of tradition. Even if we accept both terms, we should not treat both uses of the term as having the same meaning.
