28 November 2011

BibleSupport.com Membership Numbers

Either Friday or Saturday ( 20111125, 20111126) the number of members of BibleSupport.com reached 7376. The same number of people as are subscribed to the esword@yahoogroups.com list. (Currently, 20111128, BibleSupport.com has 7,504 members who have downloaded 276,227 resources.)

Biblesupport.com currently offers:
  • 1,021 raw content to convert into resources;
  • 83 Pocket e-Sword resources;
  • 299 MySword resources;
  • 1,978 e-Sword 8.x resources;
  • 2964 e-Sword 9.x/10.x resources;
  • 22 utility programs;
  • 7 documentation related files;

27 November 2011

eBook Readers for Bible Study

I miss e-Sword on the Android platform.

I have tried other Biblical Software programs, but the trial/gratis versions don't meet my needs. If the gratis version is a fail, why should I expect the non-gratis version to not fail?

One of the Biblical blogs I follow suggested using an ebook reader for the material that is not available in a format usable by the Biblical software one uses. On the face of it, that is a sound suggestion. As a practical matter it fails. Maybe I tried the wrong ebook reader software, but none that I tried offered the ability to search by Subject, Dewey Decimal Number, Cutter Number, Library of Congress Catalog Number, or any other standard method of organizing large book collections.

Case in point. For today's Bible Study I wanted to check a reference in The Didache. I have four ebooks that contain it. I don't remember the names of those books. With e-Sword, a search for "Didache" in the Reference Library component brings up the ten copies I have in e-Sword refx format.

One of the organizations that creates Biblical Software for mobile devices claims that people won't carry their theological library in their mobile device. Two years ago I would have agreed with them. Today, I disagree. The more one uses one's theological library in one's usual Bible study, the more difficult it becomes to study the Bible without it being present.

02 November 2011

BibleSupport.com: 6007 and counting

On 13 June 2011, BibleSupport.com setup services. Today  (2 November 2011) has 6012 members.  (Five people signed up between the time I started writing this point, and published it.)

By way of comparison, eSword@yahoogroups.com, the largest email support list for e-Sword, took six or seven years to reach 6,000 subscribers.  Currently, it (esword@yahoogroups.com) has 7,377 subscribers.

I have mislaid my data for e-Sword-users.org. My recollection is that took more than a year to reach the 6,000 member mark.

Whilst the news announcement Growth in September ( http://www.biblesupport.com/page/e-sword-modules-message-board.html/_/news/growth-in-september-r36 ) is now two months old, it shows how their bandwidth usage has grown.  The current tagline proclaims "6,012 members downloaded 226,988 resources."


Pulpit Commentary (all 66 books) for e-Sword has been downloaded 4,988 times.
  • If you upload three resources, you'lll have a place in the top twenty file submitters.
  • If you upload one hundred resources, you'll have a place in the top five file submitters.
  • To have a place in the top twenty file downloaders, you'll have to download 1,400 files.
  • To have a place in the top five file downloaders, you'll have to download  every e-Sword resource that BIbleSupport.com offers.
Things that BibleSupport did right, and e-Sword-users did wrong:
  • Make it easy for users to submit resources;
  • Make it easy for users to download resources;
  • Run a bot that scours the Internet looking for e-Sword resources;