Do I need to buy Logos 7?

Bobby Farris Jr said:

Do I need to buy Logos 7?

Bobby Farris Jr said:

since I already have the new features with Logos Now, why should I purchase a Logos 7 package. I have looked at the possible books that I would add and honestly have no great desire for them especially since at this moment my money is extremely tight.

Based on your situation, no you don't! There really are three things being offered at present: 

• New Library - These are a good way of picking up volumes of resources at a "low" (relatively speaking) cost. If you aren't in the market for new books, there is no reason to get a new library. 
• Full Feature Set - This is the purchase of features & datasets to own. If your thing is primarily "new books," this may not be for you, especially if you don't mind renting the features through a Logos Now membership. 
• Logos Now Membership - Although many users view this as simply "renting features," it is more than that. It is Faithlife's membership program. It does include a rental of the "Full Feature Set," but it includes many other member benefits. It is cheaper for users in the short term... and perhaps in the long term to. If someone will want to stop updating, but continue to use the features, the Full Feature Set might be a better option. For me, the primary use of Logos is a "research library." I like the new features, but could live without them. For me , LN is the best option.

SineNomine said:

So Alabama probably means "New libraries" here

EnochBethany said:

How to use it should be up front included with your purchase.

Recommend taking the free 10 Day Challenge to learn Bible Study using Logos => https://www.logos.com/10-day-training

Logos wiki => https://wiki.logos.com includes link to => Pro Training Videos with many free professional videos about using Logos

Logos Help includes Library plus much more:

EnochBethany said:IMHO, a big problem w/ Logos is that it has no way to easily make a library -- it has no library at all!  Logos is like a big room with many, many books, but just scattered around on the floor in a mess.

Logos resources tend to have Subject metadata, which is helpful for sorting:

Logos wiki has => Library and => Collections 

Forum Thread => Collection rules for sorting commentaries has many collection rules "virtual book shelves" for commentaries.

Thankful for Faithlife groups so Collections can freely be shared. Logos Collections has 319 Collections shared.

Thankful for many friendly forum discussions; have learned a lot plus have a lot to learn.

Keep Smiling [:)]

EnochBethany said:

Library organization should not require jumping through hoops, hard work, blood/sweat/tears.

Thankful for Library collection rules that can be freely copied, which reduces amount of hard work; getting to know what's in a library with thousands of resources does take effort.

Different people have various ways of grouping and prioritizing resources. Logos provides flexibility for custom collections plus prioritization that fit your organizational preferences. Logos wiki => Prioritizing

Personally use a mixture of resource meta-data plus my tagging for organizing my library. One use for my tagging is to identify resources that have interlinear tagging. Note: every tag is a collection, which can be included OR excluded from other collections.

EnochBethany said:

There should be categories like "COMMENTARIES" sub:Whole Bible Commentaries, OT Commentaries, NT Commentaries, Individual Book commentaries & the like.

Logos wiki => Canonical Commentary Collections has example rules for Individual Books plus One Volume along with some alternatives.

Faithlife offers thousands of commentary resources, which have Subject tagging so can create your own collections of categories and sub-categories.

My library has 3,555 English Bible Commentaries with 109 for the individual book of Genesis. Yet Logos.com shows 6,666 resources are available for my purchase => https://www.logos.com/products/search?Status=Live&unlocked=no and Vyrso shows 20,260 eBooks available for my purchase => https://vyrso.com/products/search?q=&Status=Live&unlocked=no so my Library could be expanded significantly.

Value of expansion depends on the resource(s). A larger library has more digital text that can be searched. One Hebrew forum thread discussion mentioned gentilics so my search for article(s) found one in chapter 16 of => Hebrew for Reading Comprehension that is included in two collection bundles, but not in any Logos 7 base package.

Did not know content of Hebrew for Reading Comprehension until search for articles about gentilics; now am reading this resource and working through exercises since target audience matches my learning desires. Being able to right click on exercise 1 Hebrew names to open a Hebrew Lexicon was useful for learning (and validating several of my guesses). Note: one name שָׁאוּל has a vowel point that is different than Lexicon entry שְׁאוֹל

Most Bible Commentaries for an individual book includes the Book name in Subject field.

EnochBethany said:

"LEXICONS" sub: Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic.

Library can be filtered by Type:Lexicon then sorted by Language field:

English lexicons have definition/discussion in English with headwords for other Languages. The German and Spanish lexicons have definition/discussion auf Deutsch und Español.

EnochBethany said:THEOLOGY sub: Systematic Theologies; Sub-sub: Calvanistic, Arminian, Liberal Hair-Brained, etc.; sub Biblical Theologies, sub: Individual Topic theologies.

Observation: what is "Liberal Hair-Brained" to one Logos or Verbum user can be "Brilliant" for a different user. Also some authors have changed their position over the years so appropriate theological grouping is challenging.

Thankful for resources not being living people because passionate discussions from different view points would be intense.

Keep Smiling [:)]

EnochBethany said:

Incidentally, as a rule a list should not have more than 7 items.

This is an appropriate rule in some contexts as it is a common limit of human memory. However, for myself, I find the limit of a "library shelf" to be a more useful limit. I have the commentaries and monographs "shelved" in 3 intersecting ways: historical era, theological stream and methodology. This results in groups shorter than and much longer than 7 ... but they are all small enough that I can easily find the resource I am seeking. I understand your desire for "automatic classification" for which Logos supplies some. However, I prefer being able to make categories that are useful to me rather than those that are standard. A very simple example: most users find apostolic fathers-church fathers-reformation to be a useful historical division. I prefer to expand the church father section to go up to the Great Schism giving me apostolic fathers-pre-schism-reformation.

Frequently the groupings that you use as illustrations are quickly achieved via dynamic collections e.g. type:lexicon lang:spanish ... but you are correct, just as organizing a paper library is primarily a user task, so much of organizing a large Logos library is primarily a user task. If you have specific problems in doing so, please ask. We're here to help.

Denise said:

Agree:

- Here, I'd say JoshRI (another Logosian) is correct. Logos delivers a very flexible blank slate. Ergo, hours and hours to organize. Why not a button to push, and Logos creates a first blush that folks can edit.

I agree that a first cut would be useful for the low-end packages or for certain categories of books. I would prefer that more metadata be exposed and that common collection groupings could be selected and downloaded. The latter approach scales better.

Denise said:

- Now I'm certain our Logosian apologists will yell 'Type!!' or 'Subject!!!'. Or even better, 'hold the shift key down!!!' (to create sub-sorts).

I disagree. [;)]