Personal books in Logos mobile app

NB.Mick said:

While I understand the technical issues behind this,

It was my impression that the issues were legal more than technical.

Bob Pritchett said:

If there was a simplistic answer, we'd share it. It is a complicated, muddy issue, though.

- There are surprising technical difficulties: chief among them are that we don't do a local index on mobile devices. (Yet. And maybe never. But that's a whole technical problem itself.) So we have to search the whole catalog on the server, and that whole catalog takes nearly 24 hours to index. But at least it only needs to be reindexed when we create a new resource, so no more than once a day. Which just barely works. Then we filter out results for books you don't own. (I may be glossing over details here, but it's generally correct.)

Adding user-created PBB's to this story dramatically increases the number of titles, could delay indexing to where we can't do it in 24 hours, and really clutters the index, because a massive number of PBB books are the same book created independently by many people, due to sharing of source files and recompiling of them.

- PBB was intended to be a way to compile your own personal books. We aren't, for obvious reasons, interested in a creating a model where all of our users become competitors to ourselves, using our own tools. Taking public domain titles, building PBBs, and then sharing those PBBs for free is a great community service, but a bad business model for us, who ends up maintaining the storage, servers, tools, etc. Yes, yes, yes, we could price that into our business, etc. but... we didn't. And it's late to go re-engineer our entire pricing and business model to being a tools provider for user-shared content libraries.

We're also concerned about various problems with user-created content, based on our experience: When third-parties previously were enabled to create books in our format (even professional, business third parties), there were varying levels of quality. No matter who created the book, and no matter what it said in the information panel, we took the phone call / the complaint / the heat. (Yes, our books aren't all of perfect quality, and there's probably a title that needs maintenance that's annoying you right now. :-)  But we do have consistent standards and regularly invest in fixing both books with many reported issues and ALL the books on an ongoing rotation basis. We can't do that with third-party created content.)

This would be less of an issue if most PBBs were a user's own, original content -- but most PBBs are actually public domain content. Often a duplication of something we already sell (thus competing with us, at the price of free), or something we intend to produce (which would be nearly all public domain content in the biblical studies area).

So yes, we want to protect our business model and keep our customers from competing with us using our own tools. Which sounds unfriendly, but at some level is essential and normal: it's why the Apple App store rejects some apps that compete with Apple, why the Amazon Echo won't let you build a third-party skill that reads audio books (that could compete with their Audible offerings), etc. Businesses don't like to build the tools of their own destruction. Yes, it happens, and sometimes you have to take some lost revenue in order to win customer goodwill, but there has to be a line somewhere.

(And, in theory, if we did just eat this small lost sales on PD content, but made it super easy to share and use PBBs -- and even created the originally planned PBB store where you could sell or giveaway PBBs that were then easily integrated into other users' libraries, we'd probably end up spending a lot of time playing whack-a-mole, and making people angry, as we tried to enforce whatever copyright and non-duplicative-to-existing-Logos-offerings rules we put in place.)

- All of this is something we might still endure and invest in if it enabled us to do what PBB was intended to do: let you publish your own content in Logos format for personal (or even shared) use. But....

NOBODY does that. *

* In this context 'NOBODY' does not mean zero, but is practically zero in terms of the percentage of people using our platform.

We did an analysis of the books run through the PBB system, and not only are close to zero of them actually 'personal' books (and there mostly sermons, which we're now planning to support through different tools, including SoundFaith.com, with integration with Logos searching), but a huge number are actually copyrighted titles scanned, exported, or otherwise brought into the system.

So, enabling PBB sync to mobile, or a PBB store, would be investing a lot more work to not only decrease sales of our public domain titles, but (mostly) enabling what's likely illegal (or legally dubious 'fair-use') distribution of copyrighted titles.

In theory, if we skipped the store and only enabled sync of your own files, we might be in the DMCA safe harbor zone, and not responsible for the copyright violations, and unlikely to get takedown notices in light of the fact that the files would stay within each user's own file storage / sync data... but it's a lot of work to support a not great scenario.

And, lastly, NOBODY uses PBB. *

* Same asterisk. Yes, I know that's not true -- that's why this thread is here. But in the big picture of all our users, PBB is a feature used by a tiny group of users who are passionate about it and have many resources in the system, but represent, as a group, only a tiny fraction of our user base.

None of these issues alone is the reason PBB doesn't get attention, and none of these issues are black-and-white. It's all muddy and has 'vague feelings' attached. :-) That's why it's been hard to be super-clear.... we want to support certain scenarios, and some users want those too, but reality aligns more with other scenarios, which we're not excited about for both technical and business reasons....

The scenarios we'd like to support are:

1) Users archiving and retrieving (and even sharing) their own sermons. We'll be addressing this with specialized tools and databases. (Sermon Editor, SoundFaith.com and more to come.)

2) Users being able to store articles, research, and clippings for their own purposes -- a kind of clippings file. We're considering addressing this with support for searchable attachments to Notes, a long-standing request. PDF, audio, video, etc. (No date yet, but it's a planned feature. And please note that attached documents wouldn't have all the functionality of actual notes or native resources.)

3) Users archiving and sharing the results of their study that aren't really monograph length, but are worth sharing. We'll support this through improvements to document sharing, and particularly by improving discovery of what's publicly available.

4) Users creating, sharing and even sellling their own monographs. We thought PBB was a solution for this, but now realize its more rare than we thought, and still best served by going through a 'publisher', whether third-party or our own Lexham Press. 

We do not have plans to 'kill' the PBB feature or disable what already exists. We haven't announced the death of PBB because we don't intend to take anything away, but we have announced that mobile sync and the store are on hold. I'm still not sure, even with all this, that we won't eventually do these things, but right now, based on present use cases and number of users, it's at the very bottom of our priority list.

I hope this helps clear up any misunderstanding. Thanks!

-- Bob