I guess I always knew it was inevitable that the Wordsearch Bible study application would fold. And realistically, it couldn’t have happened in a better way: Faithlife/Logos put them out of their misery on Friday, buying the platform (i.e. technology, licenses, and customers) from Lifeway, and immediately started moving Wordsearch users over to Logos by transferring their book licenses to Logos editions, and giving them a customized version of the Logos desktop application to run, based on how current their Wordsearch license was. For me, that meant several hundred titles I had in Wordsearch but hadn’t replicated in Logos are now available to me in superior Logos editions, which both greatly simplifies my use of them, and increases their study value.
I had mixed feeling initially, given my almost 30-year history as a Wordsearch user, and my appreciation for a few of its better features, but then it dawned on me that I almost never run it anymore, except to access resources that are now going to be made available within Logos. The functionality of the Wordsearch toolset is almost all implemented better in Logos, with the only real weak spot being Logos’ over-reliance on the new Notes system as the only internal repository for user-created data except for the ability to create “personal books”. In short, the completion of the new-to-Logos resources allowing the last of them to migrate from Wordsearch to Logos cannot happen fast enough for me at this point. If I can really have all those books in Logos without having to buy them again, I’m ready to run the uninstaller, and close out that chapter.
However, it also calls for a re-evaluation of this website, since no small part of the effort over the past dozen years has been to provide comparative and analytical content for Bible Study software, and Wordsearch received most of my attention. I’ve been very critical of it – especially back when it was my primary Bible study tool – which I’d say was prior to the releases of Logos 4 and Wordsearch 10. I’ve never done an analysis of Logos on this site, primarily because it is so complex that I’ve never felt like I had a good enough handle on it to produce a profession caliber analysis. And if I’m not going to write about Logos, I don’t see any point anymore in writing about Bible Study software at all. For desktop software, Logos and Accordance are the only serious options left, and Accordance can neither match the breadth of Logos, nor beat Logos on price, which is where the other smaller options had an advantage. Game, Set, Match – Logos.