API Access
I can see you block XML access for non-logged in users. I understand the decision, but is there any chance you may relent on this, and allow access to your free resources (at least those without licensing restrictions) as a web API?
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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am fairly new to Logos and am wondering if it can be used if online in a situation like chrome laptop from samsung
We'll be considering API access in the future, but for now we're focusing on getting our own sites working. Then we'll have time to think through the implications of others. Feel free to email me your ideas/proposals, though, on what you'd want to do with API access.
Bob, any developments on making a Web API (XML/JSON/whatever) available? If so, how do we find out more about it?
We're busy with some other major projects, so I can't promise it will be soon, but our goal is to offer better API access via the developer interfaces at http://biblia.com.
Is there any hope to enable API access for the books available for Logos? I'm thinking it would be nice to search via API if a certain book is available for Logos, as well as basic book info. It would also be nice to be able to pass a users credentials to get a list of all the books a user owns. This would be really nice for ebook library management, so one could import easily the 1000's of books one has in Logos.
Okay, as I can read here, the answer to the OP was "potentially in the future".
That was 6 years ago. The future is now
Any update on this?
Nearly another 7 years have gone by and no word on this?
It seems pretty backwards to not allow an ecosystem of apps and services that talk with the resources you build to sprawl up. My main need for a proper API is to collect and manage my highlights and personal notes. Pretty much every single digital resource marketplace includes this. The fact that you don't seem open to this worries me, from a purely data perspective: it's my data, I should be able to have access to it. Legally, I can maintain excerpts of books for my own personal research, so I don't even see how that's an issue.
Let my comment stands as an exhortation: don't expect your company to hold the absolute best ideas for what to do with the resources you have/provide. Open an API, with whatever restrictions legally needed, that allows us, students of the Word but also developers and entrepreneurs, to come up with ideas and solutions for problems that you guys don't have foresight of or coverage for… Focus on doing what you're doing well, and let "us" build on that.
In Christ always,
--LF
The approach that will e effective is to add the API as a suggestion at Roadmap | Faithlife At this time the only related request is Extend API to Manage Personal Books | Faithlife which has only one vote. A Proclaim API project went through feedbear to completion. To get an improved API show that it is a user priority.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
Hey Levi - I originated this thread before I was a Faithlife employee.
One of the problems is that Logos does so much, and different users want access to different APIs. It would be a ton of work to open up everything, and if we only open up some things, they might get very little use. It's very hard to know whether developing public-facing APIs is the best use of our limited development resources. Threads like this help us understand it, but the fact that this thread has had only a handful of posts in the last seven years may help you to understand why we haven't yet built public API endpoints.
You do have access to your data, in the app. If you wish, you can also access your data by accessing the underlying SQLite file that's used by the desktop app (although that method is not officially supported, of course). Depending on your use case, you may find that a relatively easy way of getting the data you need.
Mark Barnes
Principal Product Manager for Bible Study Tools
Mark, I suspect I never bothered to reply to this because I doubt it would make a difference. But, as several other posts have pointed out, opening up even basic API would allow others to greatly expand what the product could do. Vis-a-vis the number of replies, you're not counting all the additional people who would take advantage of what would be built on top of that API.
What I'd really love is to be able to use Logos Bible Software on my Linux Mint machines. The web application is passable, but I don't always have internet access.
Failing that, I might consider writing my own Linux desktop program if Logos made a web API available. (I used to be a software developer before I went to seminary.)
Unfortunately, this is apparently a no-go as well.
Logos, please seriously consider supporting Linux. As Windows 10/11 becomes more intrusive and more resource heavy, many of us would like to leave Windows. Mac is not a better answer. The Linux community is growing and deserves some love.
Thanks. God bless!
It's not officially supported, but some users have had reasonable success using WINE.
Mark Barnes
Principal Product Manager for Bible Study Tools