Feb 26, 2010
Are Bibles Leading the e-Book Revolution?
Chris Faraone of the Boston Phoenix observes:
At the time of this writing, six of the top 20 most popular paid e-books in the Apple App Store are Bibles. Likewise, the Washington State–based company Olive Tree’s Bible Reader is consistently one of the most downloaded free books. Users have left thousands of comments praising e-Bible serviceability; one version with a social-networking component even allows believers to search for other folks who want to chat about specific chapters. More so, it can tap a smart phone’s GPS to locate local prayer groups with similar affinities.
And it is e-Bibles that have helped push technology forward, by allowing users to seamlessly flip between scanning on an iPhone and reading on a laptop (without losing their page). Ditto the ability to switch, mid-stream, between Standard English and dozens of translations, or jump to an audio-book version, while keeping place to the sentence. Learned readers can even teleport from one particular chapter/verse in the King James Version to the same place in the New International Version. The future is now.
For a dash of cross-cultural validation, on Nokia’s Ovi store for the N97 the top selling reference is Tie Master Pro! Then comes three bible-related apps. But then after that it’s 5 different translators before you get to the next bible one.
The top free one is a dictionary, followed by a Quran reciter, followed by a glucose health reference app.
Very odd that Bible apps should be so popular but I guess not that surprising given that the bible is such a popular book.
Religious publishing needs have historically moved technology forward. I like to say that religion drives publishing technology forward, while pornography popularizes each new advance in technology and thus brings the price down. Go back as far in history as you’d like, and that’s what you’ll find.
I’ve been publishing Bibles electronically since 1988. As an industry, we have consistently been on the leading edge of technology. Before anyone was reading anything on their PC, companies like Parsons Technology, Biblesoft and Logos were publishing entire libraries of Bibles and refernce books including commentaries, dictionaries, atlases, daily devotionals and more.
Before the industry moved to standardize the format that publishers use to send books to electronic publishers in 1998, the Bible software industry had already developed a binary standard that allowed not just authors and publishers to exchange text in a standard way, but for end-users to move their Bible-related e-books between book reading software published by a number of different software publishers while maintaining DRM security. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEP_Library)
I saw my first Kindle-like device for reading the Bible in 1989. It was roughly Kindle-sized and featured the text of several versions of the Bible. This was 10 years before the first round of e-book readers hit the market in 1998-1999 and 20 years before the first successfuly e-book readers from Amazon and Sony. While this device was never a commercial success, Franklin Electronic Publishers (www.franklin.com) has had a successful line of simple hardware-based Bibles for at least 15 years.
Google has had great success with its online, cloud-based apps in the last few years. When I was at Parsons Technology, we launched the QuickVerse Online Library in 1996, which allowed you to supplement your PC-based library of Bible reference books with an online library of hundreds of fully-searchable titles that integrated seamlessly with books on your hard drive or CD-ROM. We just didn’t know we were supposed to call it “cloud computing”.
We started Laridian to focus on mobile Bible software in 1998. In 2003 when the Open eBook Forum was trying to push the idea of electronic publishing, they began collecting statistics and invited member companies to submit sales numbers every quarter. We were shocked to find that our little mobile Bible software company constituted 25% of e-book sales that year. We did some estimating based on what we knew of our competitors and determined it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to believe that Christian e-book sales were well over 75% of the total volume of e-books being sold.
So what you’re seeing is actually a long-term reality, not a recent phenomena. Because most people pidgeon-hole “religious” publishing into a couple of shelves in the far corner of Barnes and Noble, and because church attendance isn’t as ubiquitous as it once was, it’s easy to dismiss the importance of Bible publishing in the bigger e-book market. But once you examine the facts, as you have begun to do, you will be surprised at how significant we Bible publishers actually are.
Thanks for noticing.
Craig Rairdin
President
Laridian, Inc.
http://www.laridian.com
Former VP Church Software, Parsons Technology
Original author of QuickVerse Bible software