Bibles to Go: Apps, Flash Drives
By Marcia Z. Nelson -- Publishers Weekly, 10/27/2009 10:44:00 AM
PW surveyed new sacred texts on October 5. The infinite variety of new editions includes better and spiffier digital versions.
Desktop computer-based resources—software programs, online components—for Bible reading and study have been around a while. The leading edge of the digital publishing market is applications for iPhone, Blackberry, and other smart mobile devices. With phone apps (applications) a rapidly growing field, there are possibilities—and jobs and fees—to be had transforming Bible texts, study aids and commentaries into tiny and full-featured Bibles-to-go.
“We’re growing quite a bit,” said Drew Haninger, president, CEO and founder of Olive Tree Software, a Spokane, Wash., employer of 20 looking to fill eight more positions. Olive Tree has been doing Bible versions and study tools for handheld devices since 1998—an eon in digital publishing time—and through relationships with Bible publishers now has available more than 100 electronic Bible translations.
Ligonier Ministries, which publishes the Reformation Study Bible, was able to get an iPhone app developed quickly and, even better, for free by a software developer. “The translation onto iTunes [iPhone’s media player] was something we saw as pretty natural,” says John Cobb, the ministry’s marketing director, who is 29. Ligonier used a lower introductory price during the month of September to pique initial interest.
Not a phone app but highly portable is God on the Go, a Bible on a flash drive from ACTA Publications, a Catholic publisher in Chicago; one of its Bible translations is the Catholic NRSV. The flash drive has 90% free space so it can also hold other files.
There are problems; it can take a long time to get permission to use a Bible translation. The King James Version is in the public domain, so it shows up a lot in smartphone apps. The user interfaces for all the mobile devices are different. Above all, things change really fast in technology. Zondervan, which has a number of digital products in development, announced in September it would retire its Pradis software for Bible study and license other search engines for use with its titles, including Logos Bible Software, one of the market leaders. Paul Engle, senior v-p and publisher, church, academic and reference resources, says that products for mobile devices are also in Zondervan’s future.
“We want to continue to stay in tune with where consumers are and what new technologies develop so that our content is available in multiple ways,” he said in an e-mail.
