DEAR MARK BARNES and other powers that be. Prove certain forumites wrong.

Every now and then, someone on the forums indicates that Logos pays no attention to the Suggestions forum or the Feedback site. Please institute regular reporting (when released, monthly, or quarterly) of books added that were suggested by users, feature modifications that were suggested by users, and data updates that were initiated by users. The intent being to reassure users that Logos is listening and responding as is appropriate given their priorities and resources.

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Rosie Perera

I believe I'm the most recent forumite to make such a claim, and I confess it was based on hearsay. Logos has never (to my knowledge) indicated to us when they take up our book suggestions into their internal database of "hope to get someday" books, and I don't expect that to start any time. It would just add an unnecessary layer of time-consuming bureaucracy. It has always felt like putting things into a black hole, but I make way too many book suggestions for my own good, so I'm willing to live with not knowing whether anyone is paying any attention to me.

It was more that I thought I'd seen a couple of people say they hadn't noticed any changes in Status on any of the suggestions on the Feedback site lately. But I just convinced myself that is not entirely true. In fact here's an example of one that just 18 days ago Mark himself commented on (and presumably changed to "Planned"): https://feedback.logos.com/boards/logos-desktop-app/posts/dark-theme

On the other hand, there are 2421 desktop app feature suggestions on there, and only one is marked "in progress", 2 are marked "planned" and 1 is marked "under consideration". So one could understand the frustration of people who post suggestions there.

On yet another hand (yes, I have three hands), there are 125 suggestions marked "Done" (including some number that are merely explaining to the user "you can already do that in Logos"). So progress is being made.

GaoLu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267067#Comment_1267067

It feels like a Suggestion Can that no one ever opens.

Back in my school teaching days, I used to make a big deal out of opening a fancy, decorated, one-gallon coffee can and reading suggestions aloud. Then I asked for opinions. The result was a lot of suggestions--mostly notes of gratitude to the teacher or students for each other. It didn't take much time and built a lot of goodwill among students, teachers, and parents.

I was sensitive about what note to read aloud and encouraged people to write "Private" if they did not want the note read aloud. This led to many important conversations and counsel--even with parents.

Rosie Perera

I would love to see a very small window into what goes on inside Logos with the book suggestions they get from the Feedback site and the Suggestions forum. As someone who has been submitting hundreds of book suggestions for years, I'm really curious how many of them make it past the starting line, so that I can tell whether I'm wasting my time or not.

I'd just love to hear something like: "We currently have 6,000 books in our would-like-to-get list, of which 4,000 came from user suggestions. 1,000 user suggestions were rejected outright as being untenable. We are actively working on acquiring rights for 2,000 of the books in our list. Another 1,000 we might explore in the future. And 3,000 we have not even had a chance to look at our think it won't be worth our time to investigate."

I wouldn't need to get any regular update like that, I just would like to understand how this list is managed, if such an internal list even exists (which I suspect it does), and how big is it, what percentage of the books we suggest make it onto that list, do they have a process for regularly sweeping pulling book suggestions into that list, and do they take them all or do they reject some from the get-go?

It's all just a massive black hole right now and has been for years.

Thanks.

Mark Barnes (Logos)

When someone posts a suggestion for Logos Desktop, Mobile, or Web apps, that appears in my inbox straight away, and I read every suggestion, usually on the day it is made.

If there's a suggestion at the top of Feedback that isn't implemented, it probably means it's really hard to implement. That doesn't mean we don't do it, but it does mean we have to be VERY confident that it's something that would be valued by sufficient numbers of users. Pretty much everything with a "Needs your opinion" label fits into that category.

We also have to be aware that while Feedback proposals are often very specific (and helpfully so), there are also a large number of widespread "grumbles" with Logos that might never make it into a Feedbear suggestion but nonetheless would be very valued by users.

The experimental search engine is a great example of that. We knew that lots of people found search too complex and too hard to find relevant results. So, even though there wasn't a popular feedback thread suggesting we improved it, we're investing a significant amount of effort into improving the search engine. I don't regret that, even though we could have used that development effort to (for example) add support for tables in notes, which is #3 on Feedbear for desktop.

We also don't necessarily evaluate suggestions independently. For example, there are 235 votes for adding tables to notes and 125 votes for adding tables to Sermons. It wouldn't make sense for us to work on those things separately. But in order for us to work on them together, we'd need hundreds of hours of unseen backend work to make Notes and Sermon Builder architecturally more similar. Maybe that's worthwhile. Maybe it isn't. But without that, we'd end up with duplicated effort across two teams and end up with tables that have different behavior in Notes and Sermon Builder and where copying/pasting from one to the other wouldn't always work properly.

One final thing is that we don't want to launch a hotch-potch of "random" feature improvements. We want to work on areas where we know our software is weakest. Right now, we think the biggest barrier most users face to using Logos is the steep learning curve, and we're focusing many (but not all) of our efforts in that direction. If you make a suggestion that meets that objective, it's more likely to get done than otherwise. And who knows, next year, maybe our focus will be to improve user documents, and then all those Notes suggestions can get done. Or maybe it will be Academic work, and Paper Builder will get done.

Either way, we do take your feedback very seriously. We've added native support for Apple Silicon, we're working on toggling dark mode without restarting, we've added importing third-party sermon documents into Sermon Manager, and more.

One final thing. I'm always interested in hearing about your proposed solutions to the problems you're experiencing. But I'm even more interested in hearing about the problems themselves. If there's something Bible-study-related that Logos could help with that it doesn't currently help with, let me know.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267273#Comment_1267273

When someone posts a suggestion for Logos Desktop, Mobile, or Web apps, that appears in my inbox straight away, and I read every suggestion, usually on the day it is made.

Mark, thank you for that inside look into what happens with feature suggestions.

Could you do something similar for what happens with book suggestions?

xnman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267273#Comment_1267273

The experimental search engine is a great example of that. We knew that lots of people found search too complex and too hard to find relevant results. So, even though there wasn't a popular feedback thread suggesting we improved it, we're investing a significant amount of effort into improving the search engine. I don't regret that, even though we could have used that development effort to (for example) add support for tables in

As for myself, I'm a thinking you are doing a fantastic job! Kudos for everyone involved. I use the experimental search and I for one, find it a great improvement and am chomping at the bit to when it will be ready for prime time use. I was one (probably among others) that complained about Search in L9... and I am forever grateful you listened. The change in Search in L9 to L10 proved again that you listen. Thanks!

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267273#Comment_1267273

If there's something Bible-study-related that Logos could help with that it doesn't currently help with, let me know.

From my experience in Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley) summer classes, I believe that the biggest hole in Logos Bible study is the use of arts in Bible study. At one end is a book I love dearly: Jo Milgrom's Handmade Midrash: Workshops in Visual Theology. (Yes, her husband is a bit more famous). At the other end is preparing the worship space to reflect the Gospel: Delia Halverson and Karen Appleby's Creating Holy Spaces: Worship Visuals for the Revised Common Lectionary or Catherine Kapikian's Art in Service of the Sacred: Symbol and Design for Worship Spaces. Art is an excellent evangelization tool - see how many turn out for a Mozart Requiem Mass; a tool for Bible study, and an element of worship. We need things such as Bible reference indexes to films, poetry, plays, novels, visual art, music, hymnals ...(see The Text This Week for some starters) or skim The Word on Fire Bible. Also tied in is making the symbol and image reference books more accessible - think cross-reference of visuals.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267284#Comment_1267284

Jo Milgrom's Handmade Midrash: Workshops in Visual Theology

As it so happens, I'm auditing a class on Visual Art as Theology this fall at Regent College. The prof doesn't have Milgrom's book on the bibliography in the syllabus, and the Regent Library doesn't carry it, but I see it's available for digital borrowing from the Internet Archive.

At the other end is preparing the worship space to reflect the Gospel: Delia Halverson and Karen Appleby's Creating Holy Spaces: Worship Visuals for the Revised Common Lectionary or Catherine Kapikian's Art in Service of the Sacred: Symbol and Design for Worship Spaces.

Another good one is Proclamation By Design: The Visual Arts in Worship by Karmen Krahn and Leslie James. I've added a suggestion on FeedBear for that.

We need things such as Bible reference indexes to films, poetry, plays, novels, visual art, music, hymnals ...(see The Text This Week for some starters)

Yes! Yes! Yes! Another good online resource is Art in the Christian Tradition at Vanderbilt University. You can search by Scripture reference, lectionary link, keyword, etc. We need to have a comprehensive tool like this in Logos (and for those other genres you mentioned) and lots more art!

Mark Barnes (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267275#Comment_1267275

Could you do something similar for what happens with book suggestions?

Books are quite different from software because they're not under our control. We're wholly reliant on rightsholders to get a book into our system.

The good news is that we want every book related to biblical studies on our platform. That's our goal. We won't achieve that this week or probably even this decade. But it is our goal.

We've invested heavily in automated systems. For simpler books, to get something into the Logos format, all we need is a contract with the publisher and a feed of the latest releases with links to ePub files. If publishers are already working with other eBook resellers, they probably already have a feed of ePubs.

But not every publisher is able to provide that.

Some don't want to sign a contract (maybe they don't want to sell eBooks, maybe they only want to sell them direct, maybe they only work with major retailers like Amazon).
Some can't sign a contract with us because their contracts with authors from 10, 20, or 30 years ago weren't written with digital distribution in mind.
Some don't supply an automated feed of new releases.
Some don't provide ePubs, but only formats such as PDFs which are much more expensive and complex to convert and tag.
Some publish reference books that require detailed manual tagging which can't be automated. These are much more expensive to produce, which puts some publishers off when they can sell the same book on Kindle without the extra expense.

When book suggestions are made on the website, typically, we don't try and acquire only that book. Typically, we would try and acquire that publisher's entire catalog, or at least the part of their catalog that relates to biblical studies and related subject areas. The book requests help us to prioritize which publishers to approach and help us negotiate with those publishers, as we can demonstrate a specific demand. If we are able to get the catalog, the book requests also help us decide what priority we should send books that require manual tagging.

So again, these requests are valuable. But with 3,500 requests and counting, we're not able to go after every book individually.

Beloved Amodeo

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267308#Comment_1267308

Typically, we would try and acquire that publisher's entire catalog, or at least the part of their catalog that relates to biblical studies and related subject areas.

This may be sensitive, but what about University of Chicago, specifically BAGD?

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267308#Comment_1267308

So again, these requests are valuable. But with 3,500 requests and counting, we're not able to go after every book individually.

Thanks! That's very helpful.

If I come across an author that you don't have all the books of, and it's an author I think you ought to have all the books of, is it still worth my time to enter a request for every book in that author's oeuvre that you don't yet have, even if many of them are from the same publisher?

Do you copy all these requests into an internal database to keep track of them and be able to sort them by publisher/author? Not that you're going after each of them individually, but to help you determine the number of book requests that have come in for a given publisher or author? If that is the case, then I will carry on. (I sometimes get very carried away, usually late at night, and enter 30 or 40 or more book requests at once. It's my ADHD going into hyperfocus mode. Sometimes I err on the side of thoroughness to list every book an author ever wrote even if I don't personally want/need all those books; I just believe they ought to be in Logos's catalogue.)

Veli Voipio

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267315#Comment_1267315

Then there are books that provide material for the current research debate, like https://www.amazon.com/dp/1646022610/ , and they might be obsolete after some years. It would be nice to have them in Logos at the same time as the main publication. Unfortunately often only a low proportion of the Logos community might be interested. On the other hand, those newest books might be suitable for automated tagging.

Beloved Amodeo

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267327#Comment_1267327

Mark,

May I suggest you consider the main observation of this thread

https://community.logos.com/forums/p/217675/1267356.aspx#1267356

ReformedDoc

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1267359#Comment_1267359

Mark, I think prioritizing something like making the search engine easier & more proficient is smart from a business perspective. The easier & less intimidating it gets the wider the market share. I have had Logos since about 2000 now, so I can navigate it pretty well myself, but I have had other tell me that it is to complex for them over the years,.