[sword-devel] Websites

Mike Hart just_mike_y at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 9 07:01:27 MST 2012


The Crosswire Bible Society is about getting e-bible´s to the ends of the earth at zero cost. While the sword project is one of the legs of Crosswire, it is not the only one.  Go-Bible (and formerly some palm apps) do fall into the umbrella of crosswire but not under sword.  Crosswire has an opportunity to grow exponentially. 


I surmise that the statement ¨modules are part of the Sword Project¨ is all about pieces of paper with signatures on them by rights holders of texts (or similar papers affirming no IP is infringed for public domain texts.)  That is, the rights requested and received to date have been about sword project and not Crosswire.  I see this as a very limiting activity.  Crosswire is so much bigger than the original windows program now, and to say that the modules are only sword project compatible but you ´may´ get them to work with this other program..... 


Rights contracts could easily and should be negotiated under the umbrella of Crosswire and not just Sword, because it is a far bigger umbrella.  For example, it would be a wonderful thing to see some Crosswire texts come out in kindle format.  Yes a Kindle Fire can display Sword modules fine now, but the Kindle Keyboard is a perfectly capable bible reader but remains untouched by the sword project.  also missed by the sword project is  the e-ink nook, and Kobo Readers.   You can get some form of bible reader onto each of these, but there are opportunities with each to make the experience better.  Given the developer support of these devices (lawyers waiting to CND you), I don´t think that there will be any early opportunities to do this under the sword umbrella, unless sword makes an OSIS2EPUB script available. However, if even SOME modules could be separated from the sword project and released in alternate forms, the number of compatible devices
 suddenly doubles, the cost is cut by 80%, and battery life is extended by 20-40times. Consider a missionary in Tibet.   A village has a solar panel that just about keeps up with the 30 lightbulbs in town.  Would they want an e-ink tablet, that would take 1 light bulb left off 1 day every 3 weeks to charge, or a ipad that would take all the lightbulbs in town, all the time? 


There are still many oportunities to distribute scripture that are being missed because some pieces of paper are thought to be carved in stone. 


Please, think again about keeping modules locked up in sword format only. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.crosswire.org/pipermail/sword-devel/attachments/20120409/af95e517/attachment.html>


More information about the sword-devel mailing list