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

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Comments

Phil Gons (Logos)

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

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

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

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

Rob

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024831#Comment_1024831

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!

Rob

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024831#Comment_1024831

Phil, as another free thought..... Islam is really becoming a big deal and there is some fantastic scholarship being circulated on YouTube by Dr. Jay Smith. 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. I think this is where islam is going to stand or fall in coming years, and tools for comparing the supposedly and oft claimed perfect quran are super important in this debate.

Regards,

Rob

mike

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024834#Comment_1024834

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

This should be a priority in 2019 for logos.

Rob

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024836#Comment_1024836

Mike, that would be great but of course that needs paying for. Personally I kinda feel part of the Amazon community because I have so many of their books, but not so much part of the logos community. This my funding will be quite weak.

Reuben Helmuth

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024834#Comment_1024834

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!

William Gabriel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024831#Comment_1024831

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

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

Significantly grow our digital book catalog.

Make new books available at the same time as their print and Kindle release.

Make them discoverable from a single store.

Make them available for individual purchase, not just in collections.

Sell them at competitive prices.

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

this is excellent news, thank you!

Daniel Yoder

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024895#Comment_1024895

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.

Myke Harbuck

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024831#Comment_1024831

Sell them at competitive prices.

"Competitive price" is subjective. I, for one, find much greater value in Logos books than I do a Kindle book. Why? I have 2000 books on Kindle and have never once, nor could I ever, search all of those books in one instance for a particular word or theme. Yet I can do exactly that in Logos and more. To me this means that the value of Logos books is exponentially higher, thus a higher price is warranted. It's not an apples to apples comparison - by a long shot. Don't get me wrong...I wont complain if Logos prices are lower, but simply because the price is higher doesn't mean the price isn't competitive when you realize the true comparative value of Logos books over Kindle books.

Jan Krohn

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024846#Comment_1024846

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.

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...! ;-)

Reuben Helmuth

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024918#Comment_1024918

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...! ;-)

I'm well aware, but let's start with one! The problem is that morphological tagging will tag some time and effort.

In my current situation, it's not uncommon for majority religion polemicists to make claims as to the meaning of a particular Arabic word (often translated politically correctly). These claims could quickly be checked/refuted if we had even a portion of the tools for the Qur'an as we do for the Bible. Don't get me wrong, the biblical text should definitely have a MUCH higher priority! It's just frustrating that I have an Arabic-English lexicon in Logos as well as an Arabic Qur'an, but I can't even select an individual word, let alone do a word study or such.

DMB

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024918#Comment_1024918

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).

PetahChristian

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024918#Comment_1024918

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

Setting preferences aside, any siddur would be appreciated with respect to Judaism! One is better than none.

Jan Krohn

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024963#Comment_1024963

- 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.

- 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...)

DMB

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024971#Comment_1024971

- 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.

- 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...)

You were discussing books.

Agreed on Alexa, or even worse, the Google one. We were considering an expensive robot earlier, but then saw it wanted to do Alexa, etc and that was that. Last night, a sound level app had a privacy statement basically signing over your life. Deleted.

J. Remington Bowling

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024831#Comment_1024831

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

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

Significantly grow our digital book catalog.

Make new books available at the same time as their print and Kindle release.

Make them discoverable from a single store.

Make them available for individual purchase, not just in collections.

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.

Rob

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1025160#Comment_1025160

Totally agree. Kindle books are not tagged, so non tagged would be better than no book. Is there some way the community could assist with tagging? Or could the book be released without tags and then tagged later?

Rob

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024981#Comment_1024981

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.

Jan Krohn

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1025212#Comment_1025212

Yep, Google is another issue, especially if you use Chrome. But almost every website has Google Analytics or Adsense in it, or embed other stuff from Google like fonts, YouTube videos etc., so Google likely has a more comprehensive data profile about most people than Amazon.

Other candidates are Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. However, people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are at least well-meaning, and display an amount of generosity that at least to me doesn't look like make-believe. The amount of data they have in one spot is still hugely concerning.

Anthony Sims

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024831#Comment_1024831

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

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

Significantly grow our digital book catalog.

Make new books available at the same time as their print and Kindle release.

Make them discoverable from a single store.

Make them available for individual purchase, not just in collections.

Sell them at competitive prices.

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

If the digital book catalog is going to be significantly expanded, it may be hard for consumers to keep up with the new (and old) books by authors (new and old) without constantly scanning/searching the store. It'd be nice to have the option to "follow" certain authors, publishers, and maybe traditions. Amazon has something like this where we can follow an author and they will send an email when a new release is coming out. As far as I know, Logos' emails are more general with promotions and popular items. I wouldn't mind emails that notified me of new releases coming to Logos from authors, publishers, or traditions that I follow.

My current method is to follow authors on Amazon and look at what Logos has, but I'd prefer to avoid Amazon altogether these days.

danwdoo

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1024831#Comment_1024831

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

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

Significantly grow our digital book catalog.

Make new books available at the same time as their print and Kindle release.

Make them discoverable from a single store.

Make them available for individual purchase, not just in collections.

Sell them at competitive prices.

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

This is encouraging and I just came across another great example of why this is needed today. I like to read book reviews from sites I trust and I just read a great one on the book:

Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End by David Gibson.

I decided I would buy it, so I went to your site and of course it wasn't available. I want books like this in Logos because of clippings and notes capabilities that let me pull out great information from books I read (not to mention search results). This time it worked out because I remembered to go to Faithlife books and it was there. I went ahead and bought it (Bonus! happens to be on sale at the moment) But I don't always think to go to Faithlife books in situations like this and I don't like spending the extra time having to search two stores. Even worse is when a new book isn't available and I have to add it to my Amazon Wishlist and hope at some point I remember to check back later to see if I can get it from Faithlife. That said, can't wait to see improvements in this area.