Are Smart Phones and E-readers worth it for reading the Bible/books?

[evangelist6589]

The continual upgrades in technology over the past decade or two have brought tremendous change and flummoxed users to a greater extent.

I realized, early on, that if I were to begin to create notes inside programs and specific apps that they would be tied to those programs. So I didn't do too much of that.

Things seem to be settling a bit and, since the market has worked itself out now, I'm beginning to add some notes here and there in my Accordance and Logos apps. However, I'm still moving a considerable amount of text over to my Evernote files and Dropbox accounts to keep them in the cloud.

Kindle seems to be a fairly stable system as well, though I'm not using too much of my research through their systems.

I would recommend you go and take your existing devices and SD cards to someone who knows what they're doing and see if they can help you migrate the data. I did this a couple of times with one of our tech guys on staff and was able to keep most of my stuff.

It would not be possible to get back the notes in my palm OS Bible app program for these reasons.

1) Palm Desktop is not readable under Mavericks or anything beyond Snow Leopard. I made the treacherous mistake of not EXPORTING my Palm OS NOTES data before moving to Mountain Lion.
2). I do not have a Palm device anymore or its lost somewhere so how do I get those notes to a TextEdit file? I do not know.
3). The Palm Bible app as far as I am aware has no export feature so one needs to manually copy and paste notes to the memo app and I have literally dozens of notes scattered around the Bible.
4) Usually computer geeks and these type are not familiar with older devices and platforms like what I mentioned. Heck half of them were in High School when PDA's were prime 10 years ago.

However the only GOOD NEWS of all this is that I kept my Windows CE device around and also my old 1999 Compaq Laptop so I have all those notes and bookmarks. However all Palm OS notes and such were lost. That laptop is only used to connect to the CE device and thats it. No Internet or anything of the sort. It has no CD Burner, no working USB, but only floppies. How in the world would I get those notes to the Mac I wonder, since floppies are not supported under Mavericks as best I know. However I have a PCMCIA ethernet card that could be connected to a WIFI router and the Mac could access it, that would be the only way that I know of. However the bad news is that the Bible app for Windows CE has no export feature so the notes are only contained within the Bible app so for this I will keep the Windows CE device around. Buy parts on ebay if I need them. What a shame...

 

[evangelist6589]

I wonder, and I'm not trying to be facetious...
Could it be that maybe your loss of notes, etc was purely by God's design? Could it be that He was trying to get you to come back to the scriptures for yourself? Just a thought.

I know of a man who lost an entire library in a house fire, so even books are not immune to being lost.

If I hope to use something for reference, my personal preference is to have paper books. I've been known to have my interlinear, lexicons, concordance, four commentaries, and a half dozen translations open all at one time. I'd have bookmarks scattered, just waiting for me to shove in somewhere. It looked like total madness, I'm sure.

It still probably looks just as chaotic to others, though I tend to use BibleGateway and BibleHub websites for concordance, cross reference, and sometimes n place of my parallel bible. And the relatively few times I use a commentary, I use two online - only because they're better than any I've seen in print. Of course, that doesn't mean none exist in print, just I haven't seen any.

I'm not really a tech guy. I can usually find everything I'm looking for in paper books much quicker than I can find it electronically. Call me old fashioned, I guess.

But to each his own. How do you like your steak? There's no wrong answer to that one, either.

Oh my goodness!!!! I am sorry for this. I bet he as very very depressed after that.

 

[evangelist6589]

Been there. Done that. 3000 books, 20 years worth of sermon notes and the computer that housed the electronic version of the last 10 years of printed notes. One of the ladies from church was helping us throw the charred remains of my office into the dumpster. I was lamenting the loss of that body of work when she said, "Pastor, don't mourn too long. I'm praying you aren't in the same place you were 20 years ago."

3000 books????? My goodness thats allot of books. I probably have less than 300.

 

[annsni]

I remember Padre's fire and I know one thing: NOTHING in this world is permanent and any form of notes, books and other resources we have can be taken in a heartbeat. Doesn't matter if it's digital or hard copy.

But I'd recommend, op, is that you stick with what you have right now. Financially, you are not in the place to be able to get all sorts of newfangled treats. If you already have a Mac, you have a Kindle. I know you don't like to read on your Mac but you still have the option to do it and sometimes we have to deal with what we have. My husband ONLY has a Kindle on his Mac because he uses a lot of reference books and that is the method he prefers. I have a Kindle Paperwhite and love it but mostly use it for regular reading - not studying. Definitely the Mac Kindle app is better for that.

So use what you have, don't worry about what you don't have and study the Word with the resources God gave you.

 

[Ed B]

For me, e-readers such as Kindles and smartphones are fine when I am reading for entertainment. When I want to study or if I have some affection for the subject of the book I like the old fashioned hard-copy. I don't care for e-readers for my personal Bible reading and study but I will use them when a hard-copy isn't practical or isn't handy. I will also use Biblegateway to find passages or to copy/paste passages to a PowerPoint presentations.