Piper Overload

I couldn't help myself. When Logos Bible Software recently announced two new John Piper pre-publications, I immediately purchased both.

First, you can now purchase Piper's Sermon Manuscript Library. I know, I know, you can read, listen to, download, and sometimes even watch all of Piper's sermons for free over at the Desiring God website. So why did I spend $55 for this product? Listen to this:

Logos Bible Software and the John Piper Sermon Manuscript Library were truly a match made in heaven. Search every sermon for any topic you can think of in only seconds. View each sermon side-by-side with the trusted English Standard Version. Studying a specific verse? Find out what John Piper has said about that verse by doing a simple search through your collection. For fans of John Piper, this is the next best thing to being at Bethlehem Baptist Church each week!

And once the library is mine, I will get free updates whenever more of Piper's sermons are released by Logos.

Then just last night I learned of the John Piper Collection, 24 of Piper's most popular books, fully searchable, for just $150! Logos has not (in my opinion) overstated the point that

The time we spend in these important resources will be time well spent learning how our gracious God meets our needs where we are.

I have committed myself to the purchasing of electronic titles whenever I can get them from Logos. Their products are not just e-books; they are fully searchable, fully integrated libraries of information. I am thrilled about these two Piper pre-pubs, and will find the $200 to get them one way or another.

Now it is my habit to rid myself of print books whenever I can acquire the same title from Logos. But here I have made an exception. After recently purchasing several of Piper's books for just $5 each, I will be hanging on to most if not all of them, even though I will now have the same title in electronic format. It is true that there are times that reading electronic data is simply a nuisance. But the electronic format is most beneficial for reference works, and Piper's works fit into the reference category for me since I turn to them time and time again.

So quit reading this blog right now and get these two pre-pubs (and the Libronix Digital Library System, if you don't already own it). Don't worry, I get absolutely no commission for this!

Here's Why I Believe in Logos Bible Software

There are many good reasons why any serious Bible student should invest in, learn, and use Logos Bible Software. But here's the best reason I can think of: the company is dedicated to getting it right. This is a Bible study software that I am confident will always be on the cutting edge of research and analysis without compromising quality, even down to chapter and verse divisions.

An excerpt from this Logos blog post explains the difficulty with chapter and verse divisions in the Bible:

The LXX has a book called 2 Esdras (or Esdras B) that is a combination of Ezra and Nehemiah. The English bibles have a book called 2 Esdras that is not at all related to Ezra or Nehemiah, but is a non-canonical book not found in the Greek tradition at all - it is found in the Latin Bibles, where it is called 4 Esdras (or Esdrae or Ezrae) – 2 Esdras in the Vulgate refers to Nehemiah. But modern editions separate the core Jewish material of 4 Esdras from the Christian additions, and break 4 Esdras into EITHER 2, 4 and 5 Esdras OR 4, 5 and 6 Esdras. And to really add insult to injury, in the Slavonic and Russian bibles, 2 Esdras is the name for the English and Greek 1 Esdras, which is called 3 Esdras in the Latin because 1 Esdras in Latin is the book of Ezra. Except when it isn’t. So when a reference book, or a user of Bible software, writes ‘2 Esdras’ there are a great many places that reference could refer to.

So what has Logos done about this dilemma?

We’ve just finished a massive data project that defines the various structures of the different Bibles in all their glorious, gory detail, and allows for effortless transformations from one versification system to another. As it stands now, the project consists of 56.6 megabytes of xml files that look a lot like the snip pasted above. The new Bible data type generated from this data will be available to you, our dear customers, in the next major version of the software, which means the next version will have a higher degree of precision when it comes to Bible navigation, comparing Bible versions and viewing them in parallel, and Bible reference tagging.

Bible software that dares to be that precise will surely benefit anyone who uses it to study the Scriptures. Thank you Logos Bible Software!