BIBLE for Sony Reader

[NatCh]

The copyright is on the translation.

[Bob Russell]

Originally Posted by frquixote

I already have Spurgeon's Morning and Evening in Microsoft Word (one page per morning and one page per evening). I converted it to provide a clean text for eBook Studio. As I understand it, it would be a very simple matter to re-scale the text sizes and convert it to RTF. I also have Daily Strength for Daily Needs by Mary Wilder Tileston in the same format converted from Gutenberg plain text. Don't have the Word documents with me, but will post them when I get home this evening.

Most certainly there is no rush, but I am hoping this is still coming from you!

[frquixote]

Here are the promised Spurgeon's Morning and Evening and Tileston's Daily Strength for Daily Needs. I'm sorry that the Spurgeon's is broken into quarters, but there is a limit of 1MB per file on the upload.

[elf]

Hi Guys,

Have completed a BBeB version of the World English Bible.

The bookname -> chapter number menu works ok, but I am not totally happy with it - navigating to Deut book 20 for example takes 5 million clicks. I have an idea on how to improve it, and will hopefully have a version 2 up soon. Try it out, and let me know if there are any broken chapters/links!

Any comments on how to improve the navigation system might help my fine tune V2.

Enjoy!
Elf

[Bob Russell]

Great news. I'm glad to see the Bible posted both because it's available now for the Reader (thanks elf!) and also because I had missed the previous Morning/Evening post by frquixote! Excellent stuff.

I think devotionals and daily Bible readings are the best use for the Reader with the Bible. Daily devotionals are self-evident how they would work.

But for the Bible, I would think there are two main ways to handle it...
1) The Bible as-is, to be read straight through front to back. Eventually a TOC for each book would be nice, and maybe even another TOC for each book by chapter. Might even be useful in church with that navigation.
Edit: Just noticed elf did a BBeB Bible with some navigation! Cool. I look fwd to trying out!
2) The Bible organized by your favorite reading plan.

This second alternative is the one that interests me the most. One Year Bible, for example, is available at eReader but only for a modern language translation as opposed to the more common: NIV, NASB, NKJV, KJV, AMP. I'd love to see a version of the OYB in one of the top translations, especially NIV or NASB.

KJV based on a daily reading plan should be pretty straightforward and copyright-free. Personally I like the plans that have OT/NT/Ps/Pr each day, and move through passages consecutively. Unfortunately, like a lot of people, I can't always tell what the words mean. Because of the age of the KJV, some of the language is old and incomprehensible, and others are misleading because they have a different meaning than the obvious modern interpretation of a word. (No, I'm not ripping that translation... let's not get into that here. I really like it, it's just harder for me to understand.)

Good news is that there is something called the Modern KJV that I think is copyright-free. It's included in the excellent and free e-sword software for example.

While we could each potentially create our own NIV daily reading Bible for personal use if we have already bought an electronic Bible on the desktop (not sure what the copyright rules would be for that, even), we definitely couldn't start sharing it. So what I'm suggesting is that someone creates a daily reading Bible with MKJV as a reasonable compromise until Sony Connect can get hold of an NIV One Year Bible, or equivalent.

Any thoughts? Any public domain or freely usable daily reading plans that you would suggest?

[elf]

Hi Bob,

They way i converted the bible was by writing a perl script to rip the WEB and put it back together with links to books/chapters. To change my script to output the data differently (eg for a "reading a day" format) would be fairly straightforward.

If you could define a methodology for me, I'll do the work and post a daily reading bible. What i need is a structure to work with, like maybe:

one verse from a book, a psalm, and a proverbs every day, reading straight through from front to back.

would that work? If not, give me an example of something that would and I'll see what I can do.

Elf

[Bob Russell]

I've created my own daily reading plan in the past, and learned that you can't just take a certain number of chapters or verses for each day. It really needs to be broken down according to the natural breaking points or it doesn't work very well for a reading experience.

If I or someone else can come up with a list of scriptures for each day, would that be practical? Is there a format that would make it easier for you?

Also, is this a WEB Bible only thing, or can it be applied to other translations also?

[elf]

I'll think about how best to do this, I was assuming a "system" of some sorts might work, but if it wont break naturally according to a formula then it might not work.

I can modify my script to any version I'd think, but I'd only really be willing to do it for a freely available version - no NIV etc.

Elf

[Bob Russell]

I'll think about it some more also.

I might be able to come up with a # of chapters per day for each of OT/NT/Ps and a # of verses from Pr for each day. It wouldn't be perfect -- Ps 119 being the obvious example because it's really long, but it might work out pretty good.

Would that sort of breakdown be practical?

[elf]

Yeah, that would be great. I could add a line that if chapter less than some size, put in 2 chapters, or if greater than certain size, chop in half.

Do you know what versions of the bible are available for free? You mentioned a modern KJV, what about asv/nasb etc? Any ideas how they compare to the WEB?

[Bob Russell]

I'll try to come up with something. Someone else help us out if you have a moment. It's simply a matter of counting the number of chapters OT/NT and verses in Prov, then dividing by 365. No need to worry about leap years. If Prov has less than 365 verses, it's okay to run out before the end of the year. If it has less than 182 verses, then we can cycle twice, but I don't think it's that short.

Come to think of it, this info might already be available with a Google search. I'll try that first when I get a chance.

As far as translations, I'm not sure, but I have the impression that asv is close to the official Catholic translation, but I don't know if it includes all the extra books.

NASB/NKJV/NIV/MSG are all copyrighted. Modern KJV seems similar to NKJV but other than reading it on my PPC because it was free with Pocket e-sword, I don't know more about it. I did like it, but probably should do more research on it before committing too much time to it. Anyone else know what people think of MKJV? (Again, not trying to get into a fight over translations. That can be a sensitive subject, and belongs in a different forum. Just trying to get a feel for what the translation is like.)

[frquixote]

If you like the Authorized Version (King James, including Apocrypha), but struggle with the archaic words, you might want to check out the Third Millenium Bible. The traditional language is maintained, so there is that familiarity, but the archaic words are updated.

The Third Millenium Bible is already available on Crosswalk.com and pointers to versions that run under Bible With You & Bible Concordance With You by GMPSoft as well as on BibleReader from Olive Tree Bible Software (the one I use) can be found at the Third Millenium Bible website:

http://www.tmbible.com/

It is also available in traditional paper editions with a variety of bindings.

Their copyright notice shows tremendous flexibility (you can make your own copies, paper and electronic, but you can't sell them) ... see the website.

The usual disclaimers apply ... I am merely a very satisified user.

When it comes to meaningful Lectionaries, my personal experience has been that none beats the Lectionary from the Book of Common Prayer (1928, Episcopal) or Book of Common Prayer (1662, Church of England). The former has personally served me well for over fifty years because an effort was made by the compilers to relate the Psalm and the Old Testament and New Testament lessons. Further, the selections are tied to the rhythm of the Liturgical Year used by Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and many others.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by elf

Have completed a BBeB version of the World English Bible.

I've just been playing with it and it's a massive improvement over what I had before! Thank you, elf!

Regarding the pages full of links, I discovered one thing that will help some -- if you click the jogstick up on the first link on a page, it'll go to the last link on that page. That way you don't have to click though more than half the links on a given page, so only 2.5 million to get to the middle of Deut.

[Bob Russell]

Okay, here's my conundrum for doing the Daily Bible Readings, courtesy of the statistics at http://www.marshcommentary.com/stats/...

Relevant stats are:
* Total OT chapters (minus Ps & Pr) = 929 - 150 - 31 = 748
* Total chapters in Ps = 150
* Total verses in Pr = 915
* Total NT chapters = 260

Per day OT = 748/365 (about 2.05)
Per day NT = 260/365 (about 0.71)

So dividing them up in 365 pieces is not so easy to do without causing artificial breaks (Pr, Ps, NT especially), or some kind of repeating pattern of skipping three out of ten days (e.g. for NT again).

My conclusion is that it's probably not the best way to break it up by fixed rules after all.

Anyone have any clever solutions I missed?

Note: If someone wants to see stats for the Catholic version of the Bible (with additional canonical books), they can find the equivalent info at http://www.catholic-resources.org/Bi...istics-NAB.htm and http://www.catholic-resources.org/Bi...tics-Greek.htm

[sartori]

Bob,

http://ebible.org/kjv/ has a reading plan already set up - not sure if this is what you have in mind.

Sartori