BibleWorks announced a couple days ago that they will no longer be selling Bible Study software as of June 15th. I found the news simultaneously surprising and not surprising.
It was surprising given both the suddenness of the closure (which was probably wiser than dragging it out), and because of the recent arrangements with WORDsearch, where WORDsearch was producing some of their important resources (e.g. NICOT/NICNT) in a BibleWorks-compatible format and cross-licensing the resources across both platforms.
It was not surprising insofar as it seemed inevitable that the company was not going to be sustainable, in the face of high-quality competition from Logos and Accordance, without being able to offer significant secondary resources (e.g. commentaries) to integrate into the study platform. Not every Bible Study software user is a translator, and despite the renowned superiority of their primary search & exegetical tools, the population of their ideal customer profile is just too small – and the other platforms have largely caught up anyway. Hence, their stated warnings about the inevitable obsolescence of proprietary ebook formats has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was very much attracted to Hermeneutica, as it was called at the time, when I first started looking to get into computer-based Bible Study back in the early 1990s. It was just too expensive for me at the time. I passed on purchasing from Logos Research Systems for the same reason, and ended up buying a DOS-based package from WORDsearch that I found marked down at a CBD warehouse sale.
Over the ensuing quarter-century, I have often been tempted to switch to the BibleWorks platform, but have always resisted the relatively high entry price. I ended up spending as much money on the inferior WORDsearch platform, and much more money than that on the comparable Logos platform, so at this point BibleWorks looks to me like it would have been a bargain. Oh, well. Until the 15th, BibleWorks 10 is being sold at effectively half-price. Then you’re on your own with it.