More books, faster, better pricing

It's now 2019 and I am going to grizzle again about Logos and talk about how I buy my books from Amazon.

I have a very large collection of Amazon books, mostly theology and apologetics, and I am exchanging these digital books for money that I give to the very rich Jeff Bezos @ Amazon.com. I don't like doing this, but they have a very large selection, a reasonable reading device list, fast access to new books, and decent pricing.

Now, I would **rather** fund a Christian company, and be part of an exciting Logos community, and fund Logos to further grow and build a better platform. So why don't I?

Well, take for example Logos' own Michael S. Heiser. He is a scholar who works for Logos, yet his books are **far** cheaper on Kindle. How can this be?

I really wish Logos would consider a new model where they can supply the latest, for example, Prof. John Lennox apologetics book, that I bought on Kindle yesterday, and sell it to me. If this could be made to work, Logos would have a small but constant revenue stream from me. 

Sigh. 

Happy new year everyone.

Rob

Thanks Phil. I appreciate your response. Can we the community assist in book conversions, proofing, or something to spread the load?

As for new books, this just arrived a minute ago.....

https://www.amazon.com/Authentically-Emergent-Search-Progressive-Christianity/dp/1532640390

Quoting the email.....

Rob,

Congratulations to professor of Christian Apologetics Scott Smith on the publishing of his new book, Authentically Emergent: In Search of a Truly Progressive Christianity.

"R. Scott Smith is one of the leading thinkers in Christian circles on the emergent church movement and a biblical assessment of it. His evaluation, rooted in solid theology and philosophical rigor, offers a positive contribution to the discussion." Dr. Barry H. Corey - President of Biola University There is still time to register for the Women in Apologetics Conference on January 11-12! In the past few years we have seen an increase in women in the apologetics field. This growth has been clearly seen within our M.A. Christian Apologetics and M.A. Science & Religion programs. Many of our students and alumni as well as other leading apologists will be speaking at this conference such as Michelle Tepper, Krista Bontrager, Kristen Davis, Tricia Scribner. It’s just once a year - don’t miss out!

Logos should have all bibles in every languages just how biblegateway have them.

This should be a priority in 2019 for logos.

Rob:

This stuff is a huge deal, but the other huge deal from logos' perspective could be providing fine grained Arabic language tools for studying the quran.

+1,000!

Give us at a minimum a morph tagged Arabic Qur'an that we can use with an Arabic-English lexicon. Even better, provide some interlinear and RI Qur'ans!

In regards to growing the digital book catalog, I would be glad to see resources from Master Books made available.  I appreciate authors such as Jason Lisle for example, and Master Books publishes much of his material.  

I follow many authors on social media. Every time they release a new book, or one of their books in on sale, they place a link to Amazon.

Wouldn't it make sense to "incentivize" a bunch of important authors to place links to FL ebooks instead?

What's the big advantage of Amazon anyway? It's not pricing. For normal ebook editions, in most cases, Kindle is a bit more expensive than FL ebooks.

For once, it's the huge selection of books, which happens to be the biggest disadvantage as well, since it lacks curation, and many books are quite below standard.

The second advantage is the Kindle device. There's now a range of Android reader devices that are powerful enough to run the Logos app. It would be awesome if FL could officially support e-ink Android devices, or even distribute one of the models, so that customers realize that these things exist.

I suspect that many users prefer Kindle just because of the reading experience they have on the devices, and don't realize that there are alternatives.

Reuben Helmuth:

Give us at a minimum a morph tagged Arabic Qur'an that we can use with an Arabic-English lexicon. Even better, provide some interlinear and RI Qur'ans!

Which one of the 30+ variants that Dr Smith has identified so far? One Quran is not enough...! ;-)

Jan Krohn:

What's the big advantage of Amazon anyway? It's not pricing. For normal ebook editions, in most cases, Kindle is a bit more expensive than FL ebooks.

For once, it's the huge selection of books, which happens to be the biggest disadvantage as well, since it lacks curation, and many books are quite below standard.

The second advantage is the Kindle device. There's now a range of Android reader devices that are powerful enough to run the Logos app. It would be awesome if FL could officially support e-ink Android devices, or even distribute one of the models, so that customers realize that these things exist.

I suspect that many users prefer Kindle just because of the reading experience they have on the devices, and don't realize that there are alternatives.

Advantages of Amazon:

- Lots of books.

- Finding books (search, similar, etc; Logos is hopeless ... have to use Google for Logos)

- Pricing (I don't do ebooks)

- Convenient. Never sure Logos can even download. Logos doesn't easily reverse purchases, like Amazon, but nice refund people.

- Secure. I'd not touch Android this side of Heaven.

Advantages of Logos:

- Tagging

- Software tools (eg CitedBy, etc).

- Fun to use (Libby and L7 of course).

Denise:

- Finding books (search, similar, etc; Logos is hopeless ... have to use Google for Logos)

Agreed. FL ebooks doesn't even seem to be properly indexed by Google. The Vyrso site was much better. A lot of improvement required.

Denise:

- Secure. I'd not touch Android this side of Heaven.

https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/alexa-devices-cause-privacy-concerns

(I'm sure you're aware that the Kindle Fire tablets have Alexa built in...)

Phil Gons (Faithlife):

Thanks for the feedback, Rob. I completely agree we need to solve this.

I’ve outlined these (among other) priorities for 2019:

1. Significantly grow our digital book catalog.
2. Make new books available at the same time as their print and Kindle release.
3. Make them discoverable from a single store.
4. Make them available for individual purchase, not just in collections.
5. Sell them at competitive prices.

I hope to make progress on each of these this year.

Please also re-consider or experiment with how tagging is handled. As I mentioned in another thread, I think a lot of people would rather have an untagged or more-lightly-tagged resource in their Logos library at a cheaper price than no resource at all. 

Of course the ideal situation would be to have all the newest and best resources fully tagged in Logos, but if the full tagging is slowing your down or preventing you from having a resource (or having the resource at a competitive price) then just release a "vyrso" version. I think most consumers would still buy books on your platform, even without the bells-and-whistles, over other platforms (Kindle) just so that they aren't fracturing their library.

Android issues are not just security. There is also huge fragmentation with releases ranging from 5.1 on kindle tablets thru to version 9.0 on the latest phones. But even worse is Google's tracking which is rude, offensive, and even anti democracy. They have far too much info about too many, all held in the hands of just a few people. This is potentially very dangerous in the hands of evil men. Google is even tracking you using GPS when all your wireless services are turned off. Google it, the videos demonstrating this are on YouTube.