[sword-devel] Websites

Tue Apr 10 07:30:45 MST 2012

Dear Mike,

Thank you for the insights and encouragement to target a wider audience. 
  I believe there are a few misunderstandings in your email, but also 
many good suggestions.

1) CrossWire does not house any authoritative texts, save the KJV2003/6 
text.  The module repository we do house is a SWORD module repository 
gathered from many many diverse sites from all over the internet.  None 
of these modules should be seen at an authoritative source for that 
work.  I believe we do a good job preserving most all data from the 
authoritative sources, but data conversion is almost certainly always lossy.

2) The SWORD project is a module data format, a programming API and 
engine to read that format which runs on many many platforms, and 
various frontends which use that engine, giving them automatic access to 
the library of materials.  This is our primary focus at CrossWire.  The 
original curators/publisher/rights managers of texts, from whom we build 
our library, are best suited to provide a quality book in the various 
formats you suggest. (see below for more info on this)

3) Although from the archive.org version of our site which your cite, 
you'd not know it until clicking the link.  Palm Bible+ was never a 
CrossWire project.  I remember that snippet mentioning this, but maybe 
it was before or after the dated version to which you link.  We never 
published (though we did experiment with) a PalmOS Bible reader app. 
Palm Bible Plus had done a good job and was opensource and there was no 
reason to duplicate their work, so we simply referred people to their 
project.

4) As David and Chris have pointed out, we do our best to negotiate 
rights for CrossWire and not simply SWORD format.  Though this is 
tricky.  If a publisher gives CrossWire rights to distribute, that alone 
doesn't give a 2nd party rights to re-distribute.  If a publisher gives 
rights to distribute as a SWORD modules (without mention of CrossWire 
specifically), that gives 2nd party rights to re-distribute (of course, 
unless specifically prohibited or other wording suggests differently). 
Asking a publisher to allow CrossWire to create any format for their 
text and also asking for us to pass on re-distribution rights, basically 
is asking a publisher to grant permission for anyone to distribute their 
text in any format.  And, as much as I would like this, it might be a 
hard sell.  We try not to get specific about data formats when asking 
for permission.  When asked, we usually refer to Go Bible and mention 
how very small devices sometimes require a data format shift.  So far, 
this hasn't rocked the boat.  Mentioning that we'd also like to 
distribute in epub and the various other formats you mention would 
almost certainly rock the boat.

Chris' statement that modules are part of The SWORD Project is important 
because it keeps #1 above highlighted to others, that we get our data 
from other sources; we are not an authoritative data source for these 
texts.  But what we do is convert lots and lots of data to a regularized 
format (many will say not regular enough and others will say much too 
regular!) that we call The SWORD Project (#2 above).

Having said all this, The SWORD Project engine was designed from the 
ground up to work on different data formats and markup, and output 
different formats and markup.  We have filter sets which transform 
between a number of formats including OSIS, GBF, ThML, -> HTML, XHTML, 
RTF.  We have always had the plan to build a filter set for outputting 
Go Bible modules, and building a filter set for these other platforms 
wouldn't be an overwhelming task.  As I stated above, the best source 
for producing books in these formats would be the original data 
maintainers, but for a majority of our modules, this probably will never 
happen.  Many publishers would also never agree to such a thing for us 
to produce.  However, as you state, "SOME modules" in our library are in 
the public domain or provided by Bible translation organizations who 
would love for this functionality to be possible; hence, your suggestion 
is well noted.

This work would still be under the banner of The SWORD Project as it 
would be an output extension to the engine.  We would not maintain an 
additional module repository in an alternate format.

So, how's your C++?

Troy

On 04/10/2012 03:01 PM, Mike Hart wrote:
>  > CrossWire has never been involved in any palm apps.
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20040202044710/http://www.crosswire.org/crosswire/index.jsp
>
> I used a handspring visor. I've seen related posts about this, and I'm
> always a little confused why people would seek to change history. Did
> you mean Palm has never been supported by 'the sword project'? Again,
> we're talking about big and little umbrellas.
>
> And this is exactly what my appeal is about. Crosswire is BIGGER than
> sword. a module repository should look like a bookstore, with each
> available app listed under each version of text. You want Croatian?
> Great, we got you covered on J2ME, iphone, windows 8, linux, Kindle,
> Ford's Fuse(whatever they call their car OS thing,) etc. Readers,
> Missionaries, don't want to chose a platform first then hope their
> chosen text is present. They know what text they want and besides the #1
> problem 'We don't have NIV', we should help them find what they're
> looking for.
>
> ____________________
>
>  > TEI to LaTeX/PDF and EPUB (and accordingly MOBI, via Calibre) is
> trivial to do. Last semester I produced most of my course's readings in
> PDF, EPUB, & MOBI, from TEI P5 master documents so that students could
> use the reader of their choice. OSIS is /mostly/ just TEI, so you could
> either adjust the standard TEI XSLTs to take OSIS instead or convert the
> OSIS to TEI and use the stock TEI XSLTs themselves.
>
> ____________________
>
> I completely agree that for anyone on this list, getting any text onto
> an e-reader is trivial. However, 99.9% of the world does not have that
> knowledge, and getting homework, or Bible texts, onto a Kobo e-ink slate
> is beyond their competence. Which is why, again, Crosswire should be so
> much more than sword. Things that are too easy to worry about here are
> unknown or impossible for someone who knows 5 people using a kindle
> e-ink device that speak Chinese, leaving for the homeland in 2 weeks,
> and the discussion about Christ got to a point they would consider
> transporting a ZH text back with them.
>
>
>
>
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