The Digital Seminarian

My reasoning behind this post is to visualize the potential nitch I believe Vyrso could fill in the Christian scholarly trade book market that seems to not be pursued by any company in the digital book marketplace.

I would think most seminary level textbooks would be better tools in Logos 4 rather than Vyrso. I would pay more and keep them permanently in my library. Vyrso would be better suited to general education textbooks like History, Government, Psychology and such. But that is just my opinion.

I understand Logos provides books at some seminaries and Bible colleges, but it is by request and done in exclusivity for these schools.

I have heard of a few seminaries and Bible colleges using Logos (requiring it) for textbooks and such. There are also two Bible schools that have courses published in Logos.

Moody Bible Institute Foundation of Biblical Ministry (AM Bible Courseware) requires enrollment and exam codes are only good for one student. nI do not know if the instructional portion is reusable in our Logos library. It also appears to only work in Windows and only in Libronix. It may have been updated to run in Logos 4 but I haven't heard. It is hard to get a response directly from Moody Bible Institute.

Global University's Berean School of Bible courses appear to be usable as study guides or for enrollment purposes. The only question I have about thoses are the audio lessons. The coursebooks refer to audio CD lectures but there is no mention if this is part of the Logos version.

Be sure to consult the schools catalog to know what you get with enrollment that may not be included with just the Logos resource.

I am excited to see digital textbooks in the academic setting.

I agree with you on the textbooks; it's the position specific trade books (being the bulk of the out of class reading) that I would prefer not to collect on my bookshelves. These books mainly deal with more current events rather than 'standing on the backs of those who've come before'

I gotcha, and agree.

I started with MacArthur's Library--there appears to be two preaching resources by MacArthur. If you don't have it, it's worth having all by itself. It helped hook me into L4, never realized what was on there!

For a student, I can't imagine anything better than Logos. If you order a print book, you can be waiting up to three weeks for a book to arrive by Media Mail. On Logos, you only have to wait through a download and indexing.

When I was in Bible school, I spent a lot of time searching in bookstores. It was a great adventure and I got some real treasures for my time. How much more profitable would it be if that was time spent studying? 

While not precisely in line with this thread, at least a foray into the digital seminarian was made by Moody Bible Institute with the advent of the AM courseware with logos

http://www.logos.com/products/search?q=am+courseware+moody

It would be great to see future seminaries start building booklists/collections for their students that would be coupled with tuition.

I will be teaching 2 courses this fall. Both of my textbooks are available digitally, though from 2 different platforms: 1 from olivetree (Mounce's Basic Greek) and the other in Kindle format from Amazon. I would always choose e-books as textbook if one is available.

Paul,

I've done pretty well so far with Logos.

Christian Theology by Erickson for Systematic Theology II & III.

The Revelation of Jesus Christ by Walvoord for my Analysis of Revelation class.

Essentials of NT Greek by Summers for Elementary Greek I & II. However, I ordered this in the bundle with 2 other very useful titles.

Greek Grammer Beyond the Basics by Wallace for Intermediate Greek I & II.

Holman New Testament Commentary by Boa for Analysis of Romans class.

I purchased a lot of books that were not required to supplement my reading. (As if 900 pages per trimester were not enough)

I've also purchased a few titles in the Kindle format, but I wish they were available in my Logos library because the searching and cross references are amazing. They even let me return a book for refund when I discovered that the kindle version did not include page numbers which made it impossible to keep up with the prof in class.