How about we all go together and buy a high-speed scanner to produce electronic versions of books no one's yet seen fit to publish electronically?
I've been frustrated in recent days by not being able to find Calvin's Sermons on Deuteronomy, Turretin's Institutes of Elenctic Theology and Bannerman's The Church of Christ in electronic format. Incredibly, two of the three (Bannerman and Calvin) aren't even in print. If there's ever a place for an electronic book, it's to satisfy demand for out-of-print titles.
But while we're at it, rather than simply grab low-hanging fruit by converting old versions of classics to electronic format, why not add value, electronic publishers, by commissioning new translations of works like Calvin on Deuteronomy where existing translations into English are centuries old? Then you can honestly claim copyright--creative value has been added--and justify a price equal-to-or-greater-than the print version.
I'm frustrated by the tendency of Christian software publishers to charge more for electronic versions of public domain works than normal publishers charge for print versions.
And while the move toward republication of classic works pioneered in the fifties and sixties by Banner of Truth has been truly beneficial, many of the works could use a translation fresher than the eighteenth century.
When I buy electronic books I primarily do so from Ages Software or Logos. I prefer buying from Logos because Logos makes it easier to manage a multi-book collection. But that's also Logos' achilles heel. I do ten times as many "Bible" searches as "Basic" searches in Logos because with every additional book Logos crams into its editions the number of junk hits in a "Basic" search increases. At this point, I find most "Basic" searches quite useless.
In the end, if Adobe would increase Acrobat's usefulness with multi-book collections, Acrobat would prove a serious competitor to Logos. Bibles and Biblical reference books would continue to benefit from Logos' hyperlinks and search capabilities. But the bigger a library gets in Logos, the clunkier the program becomes--and the more attractive a simple E-book manager/reader appears.
There are ways around the vast quantities of unhelpful hits in Logos searches. For instance, I could set up collections and search them individually. But frankly, weeding through hundred of books in Logos' collection manager is laborious. It would be easier and probably cheaper to buy books in PDF format, put them in categorized folders on my HD and use Acrobat Professional to index each folder.
I suspect that over time books published in in PDF format will prove Logos' primary competitor. Ages Software already uses Acrobat as its volume management system and their collections are increasingly potent--and great values to boot.
But Acrobat's library collection management capability is marginal. It annoys me that I have to back out to the initial screen each time I want to change volumes in a multi-volume book in Ages.
Logos has one marketing feature no one else can touch--the capability of their software to inform you of new books in the Logos collection. Each time the Logos software starts up on a computer linked to the internet it checks with a Logos server. As new books and sets become available, a pop-up window appears hyperlinked to a web page from which existing customers can one-click order. For this reason, if for no other, publishers are likely to continue using Logos for electronic publication of copyrighted materials.
In the long run I suspect Acrobat will overtake proprietary Christian publishing models--unless, of course, Logos changes its business model to resemble Adobe's and begins selling software rather than books. Then competition could develop within the Logos marketplace.
