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WORDsearch 9 was released Monday, roughly two years after the release of version 8. This is the third release of WORDsearch developed on the Bible Explorer platform for CROSS eBooks. Long-time WORDsearch users who have been waiting for a return of the search results management genius of the old Ref List will not find what they’re looking for, but some significant improvements have been made to version 8 nonetheless.

The biggest improvement, by far, was a complete reworking of the window syncing mechanism. In the two previous iterations of WS, as in Bible Explorer, each window (for books organized on a book-chapter-verse structure, such as Bibles, commentaries, outlines, etc) had a sync button, which could be turned on or off by the user – a general preference setting would determine which state the window originally opened in. Every book which was synced would cause all other synced books to follow along with it as it changed context.

In WS9, there are now four distinct sync groups to which any sync-capable window can be assigned, meaning that certain windows can be synced to each other, while other windows can be synced together in a different context. This multi sync-group functionality would be familiar to users of Logos. However, WORDsearch also introduced an optional driver/slave mode, similar to how Pradis managed its sync groups – but WS9 allows the user to manage the driver status directly from each window, instead of launching a dialog box. With a driver window defined in a sync group, only the driver window will cause the other windows synced to it to change context – the slave windows can be moved around in without affecting any other windows, and will then re-sync to the driver window when the driver window changes context.

Also new is the ability to designate a Bible window as an xref target window (again, familiar to Logos users). This is a major improvement over the unpredictability of WS8 when clicking links, and is made even more useful when the target window is joined to a sync group.

Another long-overdue improvement in WORDsearch is support for a NOT operator in search strings, which is entered as ANDNOT.

Searching, in general, has become a bit friendlier, because of several subtle changes to the Search dialog interface that make it easier to find and select books to search. The Search box finally supports the ability to type <> delimiters, which allows the user to use one or more Strong’s numbers in the main search string (as opposed to using the special "Strong’s #" search dialog, which will only accept a single number).

Also new are options to automatically include plurals of English nouns, and various forms of English verbs. A new Spelling Helper applet on the search dialog box can help eliminate bogus searches due to spelling errors, as well as generating lists of available words in the selected resources. These extra helps are not quite as robust as the similar features in QuickVerse, but they should prove to be useful.

WS9 introduces the concept of the Carousel, which allows the user to define a set of frequently-used books of particular types (Bibles, commentaries, and dictionaries, roughly speaking), which will always be available to "flip" to from a similar window type, with a single mouse-click or keystroke. As you flip from favorite to favorite using the Carousel, the contents of the books will attempt to sync to the preceding favorite, though it’s hard to do that consistently with dictionary-type books.

In prior versions of the WS Verse List, the entire text area was "hot" for triggering sync events, and any time you clicked on a verse or passage in a Verse List, every window with syncing turned on would move to the verse you’d selected in the VL. In WS9, only the reference itself is "hot" for syncing; you can select the text of a verse without triggering a window sync. Furthermore, VLs now have Sync buttons, meaning syncing can be turned off altogether, or a specific sync group can be chosen. Clicking a "hot" area (ref) in a VL that is un-synced will drive a "target Bible" window to display the verse in the context of the translation defined by the VL ref link, making it easy to find the range of the passage you may want to expand your verse result into.

The Cross Reference Explorer (XRE) has been markedly improved from it’s initial iteration in WS8. There is now a Cancel button to kill unintended searches. Multiple hits for a reference within a single page/section are now collapsed into a single entry in the search results, with a (#) indicating how many hits are available on the page. The tree control for results has also been improved to require less mouse-clicking to get to your results.

XRE search hits in books (not user docs, unfortunately) are now highlighted in the content pane (making the tool MUCH more useful), and the content pane now automatically scrolls so that the first hit is visible – usually.

Bible Notes are also now searchable by the XRE – functionality that was always selectable in WS8, but never worked. This is a great way to create your own inverse cross-reference resource.

One of the key capabilities lost in the transition from WS7 to WS8 two years ago was the ability to create links in documents to sections of books. This capability has returned in WS9, and it is extremely simple to do – unlike the multi-step process involving bookmarks in WS7. WS9 also provides a simple interface for creating links to Biblical passages within documents and Bible Notes using plain text for the link (as opposed to Biblical references, which continue to automatically generate links to Biblical passages).

Fans of Inductive Bible Study – among others – will appreciate the new ability to assign labels to any or all of the dozen highlighting colors available, though I believe highlighting would be far more useful for Bible study if it were supported within Verse Lists. Another nice touch in WS9 is that highlighting can be applied now as either traditional highlighting, or as colored underlining.

The Instant Verse Study tool can now be populated using a Collection, and the Copy button now makes it very clear that content is only being copied to the clipboard, requiring the user to paste it wherever he wants to use it. Collections are much easier to use in this version, and a Manage Collections window has been provided. A Library Manager tool allows the user to hide unwanted books, and the SmartLink scripture popups will no longer position themselves so low on screen they cut off text.

On the downside – and avoiding complaining about what the program doesn’t do – several significant problems either persist, or were introduced with this release.

[Update: the problem described in this paragraph has been fixed in a maintenance release.] Searching MyDocuments for text – one of the potential deal-makers that could set this program in a class by itself among its competitors in this respect – has gone from blowing up whenever it encounters a malformed HTML file, to blowing up whenever it encounters a PDF file that is not an HTML file. Needless to say, no PDF file is an HTML file, and if you’re like most people these days, and you have PDF files (which WS has supported since WS8 as library resources), then document searching is utterly broken for you. The original problem goes back at least to WS7 – probably to the earliest versions of Bible Explorer – and the function is rendered worse than useless at this point. Search will not even return results from CROSS books if there is a PDF file in the search path.

[Update: the problem described in this paragraph has been fixed in a maintenance release.] Similarly to the initial release of WS8, support for Personal Notes for non-Bible books has vanished from this release. When WS8 was released, even the icon for Notes was gone from the windows, but it is still there in WS9 – it just doesn’t do anything. It remains to be seen whether they will make a comeback in WS9, like they did in WS8, but there was a hue and cry two years ago when they disappeared, and I can’t imagine the user response will be any different this time around.

I’m finding changes to the Search Results display a bit hard to adapt to (I’ve been using WS9 in beta for several months). There’s more of a tree structure now, and there is a pronounced focus on how results are distributed among the books of the Bible. That’s all terrific in theory, but there is no way to segregate results from multiple translations – they are treated independently within the results for each book of the Bible, but I sorely miss being able to scroll through the full results of each queried translation independently. I also miss the hit numbering, which has disappeared from the left-hand column. I understand what they were trying to do, and I’d like to see them refine it, but this screen looks more like a rough draft than a finished piece of work.

Not exactly a big surprise coming out of Zondervan today, as they have announced plans to drop their Pradis Bible Study software. Not a big loss to the industry either, I dare say, as Pradis was pretty narrowly focused on Zondervan resources (most of which were exclusively available in Pradis format), and always struck me as more geared toward promoting the interests of Zondervan than that of the Christian community. That’s OK – no law against that – but don’t look for any tears to be shed in this poor corner of the world. Frankly, Pradis wasn’t a very good program, either, though it did have its virtues.

Zondervan has some decent titles that might now be made available to people on different platforms, though it will be interesting to see whether they choose instead to market through another exclusive channel.  Based on this press release, that company will apparently be Logos if they do indeed go that way – and a corresponding release from Logos makes clear that Zondervan will be the party pulling the strings in terms of packaging, pricing, etc.

Of more interest to me is some of the language used in the press release, and how it highlights some of the inherent problems in the eBook industry, and the Bible Study Software market in particular. Zondervan is clearly playing down the fact that its customers are losing the investment they’ve made in Pradis, and in the books they’ve purchased to use with the program.

In the title of the release, Zondervan says it is “Retiring Pradis Software Search Engine.” Search engine? This was a software platform, built around a proprietary book format, that certainly included a search engine as a core component, but can hardly be reduced to it.

The release goes on to say Zondervan is “moving away from the Pradis software it created and will license other search engines.” You could be excused for thinking they are going to let other companies write software that will work with their proprietary book format – potentially giving customers who have purchased licenses for those books a new and improved means to work with them – but it seems certain that what they are actually doing is obsoleting those licensed books, and working out a licensing deal with Logos (and perhaps others) to get them re-published in a new proprietary format.

The next paragraph really gets to the heart of the matter:

“We are going to make sure we, first and foremost, work with the many thousands of Pradis customers for a smooth transition to the new search engines,” said Zondervan’s Paul Engle, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Church, Academic and Reference Resources. ”Many of these people have been customers for a dozen years and we will make sure they are eligible for a discount to these new titles upon release.”

Of course, these are not “new titles” at all that we are primarily talking about (Zondervan will apparently be licensing some new titles to Logos, which clouds the issue). For the most part, these are titles that customers have paid for in good faith, and are now going to have to pay for again in order the use with the “new search engines.” Eligible for a discount, indeed! Especially since the Logos engine is free! Zondervan is apparently planning on re-selling (at a discount!) these books to customers who have already bought them, so that the customers can use them with a free reader!

Other than BibleWorks – who actually warn customers about this exact potentiality and discourage them from buying large electronic libraries, all the Bible Software publishers encourage customers to purchase large libraries of resources, claiming they are more cost-effective to buy that way. That’s a true claim – unless your Bible Software publisher goes out of business, and you’re stuck with an expensive library of books that are doomed to obsoletion as the overall computer industry marches forward in its incessant cycle of progress. When you buy a hardback book, you can put it on your shelf, and it can serve a couple generations, regardless of what happens to the publisher.

There are other benefits to buying works electronically – as I’ve attested to here on this site in the past – and I remain an advocate for Bible Study Software, but the industry needs a standard for book formatting that will allow customers to retain their investment in books as they move among software providers. A standard rich enough to provide publishers plenty of elbow room to differentiate their own eBook products from competitors publishing the same work is certainly possible, and there is more than ample space for software publishers to differentiate their offerings.

And perhaps even more important to the publishers than the legitimate rights of library investors to viable licenses is the 800 pound gorilla standing in the doorway. If this matter can’t be resolved satisfactorily between the Christian software industry and the intellectuals with a stake in the outcome, then it will be settled de facto between Google and Amazon, and the Bible Study Software industry will be worse off for that.

After several years, during which time they were roundly criticized for stringing Mac users along with vaporware, Logos is finally accepting Pre-Pub orders for a native Mac version of Logos. But based on what I can gather, it looks like something of a misstep for Logos.

The biggest surprise to me is their decision to charge a $60 fee for the base engine. The base engine of the flagship Windows product has always been free, a fact I have little doubt has helped produce the significant market out there of third-party producers publishing books in Libronix format (platform royalties going to Logos), bundled with the free Libronix engine.

That seems to have been a very effective strategy for Logos, leading Libronix to become the dominant platform in electronic publishing in these early years of the industry, yet being able to differentiate themselves from other Libronix publishers in the Bible Study market by selling additional programming functionality in the form of Addins (typically bundled with their library packages).

Not that I think a failure to be aggressive on the Mac platform is itself going to be a serious blow to Logos, but it looks to me like a lost opportunity to bring Mac users into the Libronix world as equal partners with their PC-using cousins, one which may end up reflecting poorly both on Logos and – indirectly – on the third-party Libronix publishers.

Being able to publish a book electronically on a robust e-book platform that is universally accessible to users of multiple operating systems (current and future) would be a huge advantage to publishers who want to maximize their market reach while controlling their (ongoing) distribution costs. Just ask Microsoft how valuable it is to own the platform. However, there’s no advantage to anyone in making some people feel like they’re carrying a burden others don’t share, which this pricing model will undoubtedly do. But the perception of unfairness may eventually fall more heavily on the third parties than on Logos themselves – Logos can sell their packages at identical prices for either platform, but stand-alone products will need to carry a pricing asterisk that says Mac users need to make an additional investment in a Libronix engine – one that is provided free to PC users.

Logos could eventually move to correct this by giving third-party distributors free license to distribute the Mac engine with their books (alongside the Windows engine), but that would sure miff the Mac users who are running Logos for Windows today under emulation, who are stuck buying a $60 “crossgrade” fee to get the native Mac engine.

The problems with this initial Logos for Mac release, however, do not stop with the base engine marketing strategy. Despite identical pricing for the library packages, it is clear from the Logos marketing material – and certainly from the Macintosh newsgroup on news.logos.com – that this Mac release is not comparable to the Windows application in terms of functionality. Much of what is missing appears to be that which sets Logos apart on the Windows side. The Logos marketing verbiage is vague on the issue, except for pointing out that the acclaimed syntactical analysis resources do not work (and otherwise stating merely that: “Logos Bible Software for Mac lacks some of the features of the Windows version. We plan to add many of these features in an upcoming version.“). However, the marketing sheets for the Mac library packages do not list any Addins (unlike their Windows-based counterparts), and a scan of the relevant newsgroup seems to confirm that, beyond the basic Bible Tools, most of the functionality represented by those Addins is nowhere to be found in the Mac version.

So, why would the identical library package (book-wise) be sold for the identical price, when the application package itself is significantly inferior? Worse, why would a current Mac owner, using Logos for Windows under emulation, pay $60 to downgrade his application, just so he could run it natively on his Mac? And if you just want, say, that Anchor Bible Dictionary, or IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, or any of the other many works published in Libronix format, you’ll have to spend an extra $60 to use it on your Mac. This looks to me like a raw deal for Mac users, any way you slice it.

Some of the Macintosh diehards on the newsgroup (including Logos for Mac beta testers) are celebrating news of this release as a kind of “Logos freedom from Microsoft,” but that kind of parochialism is just silly – it’s a textbook example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Others seem to be adopting a fatalistic and perhaps slightly heroic position that imagines they have a duty to subsidize the poorly executed Macintosh effort of the Bible Study software industry’s giant – which I just don’t get: it looks to me like they’re being taken advantage of.  I don’t see any winners in this picture – I think the users, the company, and the third-party providers all get a bad return on this strategy.

Clearly, Logos struggled far too long with the contract house that was supposed to deliver this Mac app for them many moons ago, but I cannot understand the logic of waiting this long, and then delivering a crippled product. Logos looks to me to have set themselves up for failure in this venture. If I’m Oak Tree Software (publishers of Accordance, the leading Bible Study software for Macintosh), I’m not losing any sleep over this. I’m predicting this will be a flop.

Logos is making their Sermon File Addin available for free in October, as they celebrate Pastor Appreciation Month. There are also discounts available for other products by using the discount code PAM2008.

The Sermon File Addin is an interesting tool (usually sells for $60, if I remember right) that basically allows the user to make mini Libronix books out of their sermon files, and then tag them for easy and effective cataloging. This is one of the areas where computer-based study systems really outshine paper-based models, and I’m delighted to see Logos making this tool available for free (even temporarily). If you own a Logos package (or another Libronix-based package, such as Nelson’s eBible), by all means grab this while you can.

This module was highly requested by Logos users, and I know people on other Bible Study platforms request similar functionality often. It really is important for these programs to focus on the fact that people generally use them to produce output continually over time, and that the ability to interact with that body of output from within the program as time goes on makes them far more valuable. I think there are some weaknesses in the Logos implementation of this, but I’m not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth; this is a great tool to have integrated into a computer-based Bible Study environment.