How do you use it? Book Prioritization 📚

Jason Stone (Logos) · 2025-05-15T15:35:35+00:00

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Hey everyone,

You know that feeling when you're digging into a passage in Logos, and the perfect resource pops up right away? Or maybe, sometimes, you have to scroll through a bunch of books to find the one you really wanted?

If the second one sounds familiar, check out Book Prioritization. It's one of those features that makes using Logos smoother. Basically, Book Prioritization lets you tell Logos which books you like best for different things. Think Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries – you get to set the order you want to see them in.

Because Logos uses your priorities in a bunch of helpful places:

Guides: When you open a Passage Guide or another guide, your favorite resources show up at the top. No more hunting!
Right-Click (Context) Menus: Ever right-click a word to look it up? Your preferred dictionaries or lexicons will be right there near the top.
Top Bibles: Get your go-to translations lined up just the way you like them.

It's all about getting the most relevant info to you faster.

How do you set it up?

It's pretty easy:

Go to your Library.
Find the little panel menu icon (looks like lines or dots) and click Prioritize Books. This opens a new panel.
Now, drag books from your Library into that Prioritize Books panel. Arrange them top-to-bottom in the order you prefer.
There are even some cool Advanced Prioritization options if you want to get super specific, like preferring a certain commentary only for Paul's letters.

Learn more here: https://support.logos.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019683652-Prioritize-Books

Taking a few minutes to set this up can make a big difference in your study flow.

How have you prioritized your Logos library? Any specific resources you always put at the top?

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Feature Focus

Comments

Jerry Bush

Love being able to prioritize my books. I wish there was a separate tool to do it with though. It could be pretty simple, with different categories of resources. It's kind of buried in the Library and hard to look at when all the categories are together.

I use headers to get around that but I wish I didn't have to. Really hoping that Logos gives us a prioritization tool someday; I've been squawking about it for years.

NichtnurBibelleser

@Jason Stone (Logos) Thanks for bringing up this topic. Is there any revamp (improvement) of Prioritization planned in mid-term time as often requested, e.g here or here?

MJ. Smith

I use advanced prioritization to tie my Study Bibles to the version they were actually written for. If I am reading a monograph in detail, I may use advanced prioritization to have it popup the intended translation.

JJ Wurtz

Values of AI. I took my Verbum library and grabbed a screenshot of each of my categories (commentaries, study bibles, etc.) and had ChatGPT help me prioritize and sort my list of books. For each list I had the series, book name and authors, I asked it to rank its strength in Catholic Theology for my use in study. For each book it provided me an explanation why this book was good and why it wasn’t with a strength bar of stars. It helped me prioritize series and individual books that were best for me. It surprised me to learn that some books I was using may not have been the best over others.

My prompt:
I am Catholic and studying to be a Deacon in the Church. Using the attached screenshot from my Verbum Library. I would like to create a list of the top 5 (or 10) prioritized commentaries to use for my study towards deacon formation. Can you provide me a strength star chart so I know which are best. Please focus on Catholic resources that the Magisterium approves for study.

My list:

Bibles I did not use ChatGPT to prioritize this list
Bibles: Greek
Bibles: Hebrew
Bible Commentaries
Study Bibles
Dictionaries
Lexicons

Sample Results:

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John W Gillis

The existing Prioritization tool is probably adequate for a small library, but I find it inadequate as-is. It could use some thinking through. For starters, it should be grouped according to resource type, or at least by index type - and that is true even if you limit your list to a couple dozen or so resources that will fit on a screen and not turn into a hunting adventure.

A couple brief examples to illustrate: I manually grouped my resources by type to make ranking relatively easier, and grouped my Bibles at the top. But them I added a Bible to the bottom of the Bibles list which was part of a set with an associated study notes resource. At that point, my mediocre Study Bible Notes resource unwittingly became my highest rated commentary, because my commentaries were grouped below my Bibles.

More recently, I found that some Bible Commentaries were now my top-rated Dictionaries (or Encyclopedias - or maybe both, I don't recall) because I had prioritized some commentaries containing Glossaries, and my commentaries are grouped above the other resource types. At that point I deleted most of my prioritizations, and concluded that prioritizing more than maybe a few dozen resources total is more trouble than it's worth.

GregW

I use it primarily to ensure I get my favoured commentaries to appear at the top of the list in Passage Guide, and to ensure my favoured Lexicons and Bible Dictionaries appear at the top of the list so I don't have to plough through books I'm less interested in. I do use Advanced Prioritisation to pull out the better sections from commentaries like Expositor's where several Bible books are covered in the same volume.

Having said that, I do agree that the functionality is clunky at best, and I've created personal books as placeholders to separate out Bibles, Bible Dictionaries, Lexicons, and Grammars to make the whole thing a bit clearer (red rectangles in screenshot below). A lot could be done to enable priority within category, and also to smooth out series. Whenever I prioritise a commentary, I am normally doing it for that one commentary, not the whole series, so having the default so that it does it for an entire series isn't helpful to me. My list is now humungous, so a way of streamlining it by type would be really helpful.

Randall Cue

Very nice @GregW !