I, too, get frustrated with some of the prepubs languishing. Unfortunately, they are market driven. And let's face it, the primary buyer of Logos material seems to be of the conservative/evangelical nature. I've also had JBL on prepub for a long time - in fact, one of my prepubs has been sitting there for four years! And it won't get better, I'm afraid.

On the other hand, I was quite pleased when the Harvard Classics collection and the Fortress Pastoral Care series went to prepub when I didn't expect that it would happen.

However - Logos is still the program I recommend and will continue to recommend. There is much I don't care for in Logos offerings, but there are also many things that I do appreciate. Now if we could only get the ICC at a lower price. Sigh.

Good job Paul, you're two orders closer to production!

I am surprised to hear some others are catching up with Logos, I don't keep up with others, but I always thought Logos had more resources than others. 

What we don't know is what the model is that economically justifies Logos publishing a new work on prepub or community, does it have to breakeven from the initial orders? Does it presume some model of purchases over the next year? Does it presume that if say there are 50% more titles published a year from now, overall Logos revenue goes up because they "win"customers to their platform?

I only hope Logos has and keeps the "big picture" on their economic model.  Being too granular in their publishing decisions could hurt us all severly in the long run.

Is Logos still the best?

Yes.

Mark Barnes said:

The more that exists in Logos, the more links are required, and the greater the cost of creating the links. For something like JBL, that's an awful lot of potential markup that needs to be done to things like lexicons, technical commentaries, Church Fathers, Qumran scrolls, Philo and other intertestamental literature, and so on. This is not something that can be done by someone on minimum wage - it would need a seminary graduate to manually create and check all these links.

I was under the impression that a certain amount of this can be automated now, but someone with the proper training would still need to proof the results, and/or do some pre-processing proofing to bring the references into some consistent standard. Not all books use consistent abbreviations and references for ancient titles they are citing, etc. It is still a labor intensive job, and indeed gets somewhat more time consuming the more resources Logos has the ability to link to.

Paul Knopf said:

I think all this amounts to lower pride in my Logos library.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy using Logos and still do recommend it, but it is no longer the only program I recommend.  Does anyone feel the same way I do?

The only reason why I wouldn't recommend Logos to anyone is that Logos is tempting me to spend more and more money (and yes, I have already placed a pre-pub for JBL). Besides, my impression is that most students/ministers here in the Netherlands have never heard of either Acc....nce or Logos/SESB. The dominant academic Bible program is B....W.... which doesn't offer any journals at all.

There is only one module for which I envy Acc....nce users and that is the tagged Kaufmann Hebrew Mishna. It's a pity that even a great pre-pub like Jastrow's Hebrew/Aramaic dictionary can't make it into production, much less a tagged Hebrew Mishna.

Still, Logos is by far the best!

One more order on pre-pub just went in...

This went on prepub in Jan of 2008 and covered issues up through 2006. Now that two years have gone by I'm hoping Logos will update the collection by a couple of more years.

Jack Caviness said:

with the release of L4, I personally think that Logos has moved ahead.

You're not the only one Jack. My PhD supervisor has been a long-term Mac user and uses the Voldemort (He-who-must-not-be-named) Bible App. However, when he came back from the SBL conference where they had a demo of VBA and Logos 4, he stated that Logos clearly had the edge. In addition he noted the real enthusiasm of the person who was doing the demo. 

Bob Pritchett said:

Good news:

...

C) .... As a result, we're sometimes "flipping the switch" on a pre-pub when it has, say, 70% commitment, because we can predict that it will continue to get orders and sell into the future.

This lets us smooth out the production stream. We always prefer doing titles at 100% commitment, but because of varying sizes, different skills available on the team, etc. we sometimes have gaps. Doing books before they hit 100% smooths out the gaps and makes production more predictable for us and our partners, lowering costs per page.

This is indeed good news ... I thought I noticed something like this happen with the Themelios pre-oub, and can only hope that the Journal of Biblical Literature will soon follow suit. I'm guessing that journals have a good steady sales stream to them.

Can you give us any hints as to whether we will see any more top-notch academic journals in pre-pub soon? Is part of the problem, many of these are published with publishers that don't currently have a relationship with Logos?

Donovan R. Palmer said:

JBL is a bit like Barnes Notes on the Community Pricing Page.  They have become landmarks on the website and we would lose our way if we didn't have them as a reference point on the website... 'oh yeah... surf to this page and take a left at JBL and then straight ahead keep left of Barnes Notes.'  You see what I mean? It would be disastrous!

BTW, I have placed orders for both!

 ha ha, why must we do this to ourselves!!