Digital Scripture formats w/ smartphones

I'm finding myself tempted by the iphone/ipod touch (As I already own a decent phone). In addition, several of the members in our unit have digital versions of the scriptures, and lesson manuals. I am not sure if the latter is notes or actual manuals.

What I am looking for is a platform that'll give me lesson manuals, scriptures, and ideally notetaking/bookmarking w/ tags in a digital format. Do any of you have any suggestions, or things that you use like this on a regular basis?

I did a lot of research 3 or 4 years ago when I bought an HP iPAQ PDA and found the YanCEyWare Reader had by far the most free LDS ebooks of all the available PDA reader formats. Earlier this year I was researching buying a smartphone as a way to reduce some of the gadgetry I carry around and decided on the Samsung BlackJack II. It runs Windows Mobile 6 (definite plusses and minuses there) and armed with a 4GB micro-SD card, I was able to load the YanCEyWare Reader and just about every LDS ebook from HERE, many classic literature titles from HERE, some more LDS titles HERE (Including every General Conference Ensign dating back to the 1970's), and still have ~3GB left over! And yes, the manuals and magazines are the full, illustrated versions, most with working scriptural and footnote links. As with most readers, you can create bookmarks, keep personal notes, etc.

There are also Spanish LDS ebooks HERE, Russian versions HERE, Chinese HERE and I'm not sure how many others are being worked on.

I'm certain there are better smartphones on the market, and definitely different and perhaps better readers available, but I have yet to see a match to this type of library. There's my 2¢. I hope others will be able to offer some experiences with other available readers.

Mike

I found a program for the iphone called Stanza, which takes books in the ePub format. Doesn't look like it is possible to convert from YanCEyWare to ePub, AFAIK.
My device also doesn't need to be a smartphone, but I need to justify the £250 expense incurred by purchasing the ipod touch on it's own, or any other smartphone, esp. considering legibility issues and advantages of dead-tree editions of the Standard Works et. al.. Yours is a good suggestion, and needs due consideration.

Other ideas welcome, keep 'em coming.

There are several options for the iPhone/iPod Touch right now, though none currently do everything you are asking for.

The one that I am responsible for (http://leefalin.com/projects/scriptures/) is free and currently contains the standard works only. (It also allows you to search across the standard works). I am planning on adding other content some time in the near future as well as scripture marking and annotation capabilities.

Lee

I'll keep an eye on your project Lee, and look forward to annotations and such. Have you got any sort of timeline for the inclusion of footnotes etc.? Oh oh.. I know! How about in-line JST?

I still don't know if the i* stuff will succumb to hype and excitement dying off, but if it can survive, methinks seeing Church-developed lesson manuals etc. for the Apple products would be welcome

I don't have a timeline at the moment. Since school started back up development has had to slow down a bit, but I hope to have more updates soon.

Lee

Unfortunately we seem to be at a point where there are fewer PDA options as more people consolidate to a single device, and the newest smartphones don't necessarily have software that will support the older formats.

A good example is Mobi, which is ubiquitous, and since being purchased by Amazon is seen as a Kindle competitor and isn't being developed for new platforms. It was ported to Symbian and Blackberry before Amazon took over, but there are no plans to develop it for Android or iPhone.

eReader is another old format that is also quite common. Fortunately, that has been developed for iPhone and is being released shortly for Android.

Few smartphones have large enough screen to really be viable as a book reader beyond looking up the occasional scripture or paragraph in Sunday School class.

Does anyone here actually use a smartphone as a primary ebook reader? I'm upgrading to the myTouch and with iSilo and eReader available, will be able to get by just fine for my scriptures and church manuals, but my wife has gigabytes of ebooks and the format compatibility and screen size issues are major for her. I'd be interested in your recommendations.

surakmn wrote:Does anyone here actually use a smartphone as a primary ebook reader? I'm upgrading to the myTouch and with iSilo and eReader available, will be able to get by just fine for my scriptures and church manuals, but my wife has gigabytes of ebooks and the format compatibility and screen size issues are major for her. I'd be interested in your recommendations.

I have not been motivated to do a lot of ebook reading on my Android. But I do use Reveal for the convenience of carrying a large body of church titles, including scriptures, that are available in the YanCEyWare format. It works fine for my needs.

Have you searched the Android market for apps that read other formats? Search the Cyrket web interface to Market via Google with "ebook site:cyrket.com" and you'll get hits on a bunch of apps. I express no opinion about any of them.

So I have a EZReader and needed to be able to read the scriptures. So I created an epub using sigil and some ASCII scriptures text I found. I can't attach it here, it's a bit too large. So here's a link to the file, at least for the next 90 days.

http://rapidshare.com/files/322290903/T ... .epub.html

I hope you find it helpful.

So I guess the rapidshare link met its download limit. Here's a more permanent home for it.

http://flintworx.com/ebooks/LDSQuad.epub

I recently switched from the BlackJack II to the iPhone. I also have a BlackBerry and have used a Dell Axim and Palm (Sony Clie).

The iPhone has my favorite app for the scriptures which is called "LDS Scriptures". It has a Christus icon with a blue background. It is $15 from the iTunes store and is well worth it.

It has all the standard works and is chalk full of features (note-taking, marking, etc) seems to have every class and instructor manual available (many that I didn't know existed), and let's you subscribe to Ensign downloads. It also let me upload Word docs and PDFs, so I know have specific talks from General Authorities that I have been archiving within easy reach and my notes from religion courses at Ricks.

It includes an Web interface where I can manage and upload content.

- Garrett

I just got my Google Nexus One and tried the Reveal Reader from the Android Market. Wow! That thing is great! It has everything I need. I am impressed!! I've been extremely pleased with Android and specifically the Nexus One so far. I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to get my Church text on it right away... but NO PROBLEM!

TB

TechnoBabel wrote:I just got my Google Nexus One and tried the Reveal Reader from the Android Market. Wow! That thing is great! It has everything I need. I am impressed!! I've been extremely pleased with Android and specifically the Nexus One so far. I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to get my Church text on it right away... but NO PROBLEM!

TB

I just got a Nexus One also and I have also been using the Reveal Reader. It works great and they are constantly improving it. It is very handy to have my Old Testament teacher's manual with me at all times so I can study it before my lesson throughout the week. It is also great that I never have to worry about forgetting my EQ manual because I have it on my phone. It also has the scriptures in various languages and tons of other content (such as LDS General Conference transcripts, etc)

Brad O.
http://musicofthemonth.com

Thank you very much. This appears to work on my nook.

I purchased a Sony pocket reader and needed to find the scriptures for use. If you have a reader, you know they are slow for jumping around, thus they make good reading devices, but not the best for looking up a specific book and verse quickly. However, there is still a need to be able to navigate. I downloaded calibre from the web and then began to experiment how to convert a text file into an epub file with desired navigation. So far, I have completed the Old Testament, New Testament, Pearl of Great Price and The Book of Mormon.

These required many hours of my time to insert the tags, and in the end was worth the effort. However, why keep this to myself? If you are interested in using my files, they can be accessed at:

http://www.icentricity.net/my-ebooks.aspx

There is a brief instruction sheet as to how to download the required files and then upload them to your reader. They are also available in .html format as well.

Here's a shout out for the iTouch and the app that the church has produced. Not only do you get almost every manual you would need, you have the ability with the iTouch to listen to or watch General Conference via podcast or download. In addition to Conference, there are a large number of other podcasts available to download as well.