FREE LIBRARY OF PERSONAL BOOKS THAT YOU CAN ADD TO YOUR LOGOS!! (Self-Publishing to Logos / Faithlif
Sorry for the clickbait title, but that is what self-publishing would enable. A huge number of new resources.
The Idea
Summary: Logos makes self-publishing possible while taking a cut of the sales. Similar to Apple’s App Store. Provide the distribution and integration, and let customers be responsible for their 3rd party content.
Reasoning: Similar to Amazon Self-publishing or the App Store, it
(1) fills a huge need for customers by making content available that Logos would not be able to produce on their own,
(2) strengthens the platform and Faithlife brand by becoming much more robust and resource complete than any other product by far, and
(3) provides a new revenue source for Faithlife.
Benefits For Logos/Faithlife
1. Lots of New Content (with little work)
- Empower smaller publishers and authors to distribute their resources that will never otherwise get produced and published officially by Faithlife
- Be a place to create and distribute content in languages with few resources, thereby encouraging content creation and sales in smaller markets. (More below)
- Other programs like TheWord or e-sword or something that beginners use are very difficult to create resources for. But Word documents are very approachable format to create in, and the cross-platform distribution would be far and away better than any other app. (Get em while they are young.)
- Also provides a way to have a powerful mobile app with the content in your language. Not just the Bible only.
- 3rd world countries often only have a smartphone, but there are virtually NO apps that have any kind of resources available across many languages.
- Cuts down on Logos work - empowers crowdsourcing while keeping Logos in control
- Most support could be community powered through the forums
- Disclaimer added to the content to distinguish it from official resources. Maybe on the download page, when it is opened for the first time, or something.
- Greatly speeds up catalog expansion.
- Content can be self-published first, tested, and then promoted and upgraded later (if popular) to the official catalog. You can work the deals to make this mutually beneficial. (More below)
2. New Revenue
From Direct Sales
- Allows anyone to produce content for them and make money for them.
- Allows you to monetize your distribution network with content you didn’t have to prepare or license. Just set up the deal, and let people upload content.
- Comparatively maybe not a whole lot, but the culmination of all the small publishers across the world add up, plus, all the customers you acquire in the process…
From Customer Acquisition
- Customer Lock-in for emerging markets (every language but English)
- Other programs are more simple, but you could blow them out of the water with content by making it simple to add content to the platform, and thus making it impossible to ignore.
- No other Bible Program could keep up once it became the goto place to easily publish content in that language.
- It would be the go-to for new languages with few resources at this point. Each language, especially, is a potential whole new customer base!
- Will it immediately be the most lucrative thing for Faithlife? No, but I think it is a good long-term investment in customer acquisition. It will fill a huge gap for customers with few resources in their language or just frustrated that they can’t get a certain resource. A pre-publish program can enable publishers to make their content available quickly and later possibly added to the official catalog. Thus becoming the place with the most plentiful resources and thus where new users, new languages, and new authors and publishers will begin to invest — which in turn will convince new customers to use Logos over another program that may have just a handful of resources.
- Think of how many customers Android and Apple gained, and Windows phone lost, just because windows didn’t have the app catalog. Enabling self-publishing would make you the behemoth in the space.
From content testing and selection
- It would allow logos to cherry pick the best content to sell
- Vet and focus on languages - pre-create a customer base.
For customers / publishers
- Smaller publishers can publish content that would otherwise never get officially produced.
- It would greatly enhance sharing of resources. Better than trying to share a personal book that can never be updated.
- Ratings, reviews, and download count could help people find good content.
- All the less popular authors that have small but significant followings can distribute their things while giving you 30% of their sales.
- Would GREATLY equip and empower the development of resources in non-English languages.
- If Faithlife can’t keep up with demand of producing English resources, how will it ever keep up with hundreds of other languages?? It never will, but this would enable crowdsourcing of content to pour into the Faithlife ecosystem, making what is available extremely comprehensive.
- I am a missionary, and there is a huge need for something like this to equip smaller languages. Resources and tools are virtually non-existent, and the small market in minority Christian countries makes it very difficult to be profitable in publishing. These languages desperately need resources, but it is extremely difficult to be viable as a publisher or author when publishing and distribution is so expensive and the customer base is so small. It must be easier and cheaper and Faithlife could greatly facilitate publishing and discoverability.
- Bible study resources could be available in Logos for Bible study, other books could be available in other Faithlife reading apps and sites, and it would be a storefront and repository for people wanting and needing to learn. This would enable all of this and make it possible for resources to be developed and distributed in the smallest of markets.
- THEREBY Logos becomes the unrivaled champion of content and features for Bible study software - leading to customer acquisitions for Logos and the whole suite of Faithlife products.
- For example, I am in Thailand - 65 million people - but YouVersion is the only Bible app on mobile, and TheWord is the only program on PC. It has like 5 total resources in Thai, and is only available on PC, not even Mac. Making a way to create, access, and sync content across platforms would be so immensely better than what is currently available, there would be no contest.
- This is not unique, my friend works in India and even though there are 1 billion people that speak Hindi, the amount of resources or Bible apps is extremely anemic. The barrier to entry is too high, but Faithlife lending their name and tools could become the place that makes it possible to collect and discover what is available.
- This solves the Personal Book dilemma by enabling publishing, but also keeping you in control of approvals, and allowing you to profit from it!
- With seeing the storefront and possibilities, it would encourage more work toward creating and self-publishing content.
- You could buy a resource of sermons or devotionals, for example, and they could be continually updated with new content making it possible to always have the latest content from people you are interested in.
How it would work
- Logos has a publisher program
- Amp up documentation from personal books to facilitate the creation of quality resources
- Publishers want to publish their content, so maybe let them publish with the possibility of maybe later having their resource upgraded it to an official resource and better deal.
- Publishers or Authors have a publishing account that they use to publish to, so a small publisher just registers once and then publishes.
- Logos can choose to upgrade any resource or account to an official partner.
- Upgrade licensing deal and resource when it goes official
- Maybe it could replace or be another type of the current pre-pub or community pricing.
FAQ’s (just mine)
How is it good for PUBLISHERS to be official with Logos if its already selling well?
It will get the Logos treatment and polish and tagging and more prominent promotion. The publisher can set the home-brew price, but Logos can do any markup they want on the official store while the publisher still gets the cut they require.
How is it good for LOGOS to officially produce a resource that is doing well?
They can take it off the unofficial store, upgrade it, set the price, and get a larger % of the sale?
Incentives for publishers
They get an easy way to publish on a great platform. And they can work toward getting officially published to sell at a better deal. Maybe 2x the profit somehow. I don’t know, but I’m sure something could be figured out.
Will this replace personal books?
Sorta. But still need the personal book function to get other books in Logos that can’t be republished. For instance that were bought on Kindle, and brought into logos. But for the original purpose of making PERSONAL books, yes, and add in distribution.
Comments
- Continuing to allow all users access to the tools for creating a personal resource without additional registration or paperwork;
- Require registration for a user to distribute the resource in the FaithLife ecosystem.
Summary: Logos makes self-publishing possible while taking a cut of the sales. Similar to Apple’s App Store. Provide the distribution and integration, and let customers be responsible for their 3rd party content.
I very much like it.
Will this replace personal books?
Sorta. But still need the personal book function to get other books in Logos that can’t be republished. For instance that were bought on Kindle, and brought into logos. But for the original purpose of making PERSONAL books, yes, and add in distribution.
I think there will still be a variety of reasons that an individual user might want to create a resource for personal use. I would suggest:
That would allow users to create resources for their own personal use, or perhaps informal sharing with a few friends, and also to gain experience with how it all works before registering as a "publisher" and uploading resources for distribution. As a side benefit, I suspect that FaithLife will see better quality resources if they allow this sort of informal opportunity to learn how to create resources first.
Summary: Logos makes self-publishing possible while taking a cut of the sales. Similar to Apple’s App Store. Provide the distribution and integration, and let customers be responsible for their 3rd party content.
Reasoning: Similar to Amazon Self-publishing or the App Store, it
(1) fills a huge need for customers by making content available that Logos would not be able to produce on their own,
(2) strengthens the platform and Faithlife brand by becoming much more robust and resource complete than any other product by far, and
(3) provides a new revenue source for Faithlife.
Profit = Revenue - Expenses
Like idea of publishing through Faithlife provided Faithlife does not lose money.
Faithlife could have an automated plagiarism checker before offering a title for sale (avoid repeat of academic embarrassments and copyright issues).
Keep Smiling [:)]
Personally, I'd prefer personal books to continue as they are. I normally use it when the Catholic Church issues a new document, so i can search it in my desktop program. When Logos/Verbum releases their version, I generally buy it because of the improved crosslinks which are superior to the personal books.
I have no rights to distribute such works, so I doubt I could continue this process for personal use if what I created went into some "free library."
WIN 11 i7 9750H, RTX 2060, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD | iPad Air 3
Verbum Max
I have no rights to distribute such works, so I doubt I could continue this process for personal use if what I created went into some "free library."
That would not be an issue in any case. At no point has it been suggested that anyone's "personal books" would automatically become "public books." So no worries. [:)]
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This was originally part of the plan with personal books.
macOS, iOS & iPadOS |Logs| Install
Choose Truth Over Tribe | Become a Joyful Outsider!
Any idea why it never came?
I am in contact with several publishers here in Thailand, and I know they would be interested in partnering up to have a new sales channel. Especially one that enhanced and added value to their content by putting it in so many apps and platforms. (Still 99% analog here for books, though everyone has a smartphone.)
Plus, with the new Logos webapp greatly lowering the bar for entry, both in system requirements and accessability for less computer literate, I think this is a huge opportunity for all the Sunday School level people that just want some resources and basic Bible tools to use in their language.
And if Faithlife had someone who was a ‘Publisher Ambassador’ to contact all the smaller publishers, showing the benefits of making their content available, I think that would pay for itself. Sets of books becoming available at a time, and all those publishers turned into salesmen pushing the Faithlife brand. (Which, I will say again, would be the only digital option in most languages.)
That kind of exists with Vyrso.
Originally FL (Bob) viewed "personal books" as personal books (i.e. ones that users created; their own content). FL quickly found out that many users were converting books from other formats. This presents two challenges: 1) legal and 2) business model. It isn't good business to let users compete against your own sales!
macOS, iOS & iPadOS |Logs| Install
Choose Truth Over Tribe | Become a Joyful Outsider!
I think Personal Books are still a very important tool to keep.
But I think having a way to legitimately capture and sell the long tail of resources via self-publishing would greatly cut down on its abuse, while potentially adding significant revenue.
From Wikipedia on Long Tail:
”The distribution and inventory costs of businesses successfully applying a long tail strategy allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The total sales of this large number of "non-hit items" is called "the long tail".”
Legitimate concerns.
I should review my PB's but I am pretty sure that if Logos produces a book I have gone to trouble to create in PB format, I will buy it if it becomes available. The books I have in PB are 1) books I own that I really want NOW, or 2) my own productions 3) books Logos isn't likely to ever produce. I wonder if many folks aren't the same.
I wonder if Logos would benefit from looking at PB's people produce to determine what people want but Logos does not have.
Currently PB are only usable on the PC or MAC platforms and not on the Mobile devices.
Another project that went nowhere. Loading PB to Mobile apps.
Faithlife allows us to put the PB on its servers so that we can use PB on all of our computers with our recompiling them on each machine but does not go the next step of moving them to Mobile apps.
I am also disappointed that they have stopped short of that last step on Personal Books, but I can understand their lack of enthusiasm.
Here is what Mr. CEO said about it— https://community.logos.com/forums/p/126859/848584.aspx#848584
Though in that very post, he mentions wanting to support Self-Publishing like I am talking about here, so now I am really curious where that stands.