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Locked-up Bible update: Hemming and hawing from Crossway
March 5, 2009 | 3:33 am
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By Court Merrigan
In locked-up Bible news, hemming and hawing is the order of the day. The marketing director at Crossway demurred when I asked if I could put our e-mail exchange up here. He’s passing me along to those who oversee digital rights. Unlike the marketing director—who was very quick with the replies—the overseers haven’t been so forthcoming. I was told that DRM-free and free-free versions of the Bible are available from Crossway; a request for links to those has gone unanswered. So I checked out the site myself. Amusingly, a link to "Online Bible" led to this:
To be fair, this site doesn’t appear to be under the auspices of Crossway. Still, I’m thinking they might want to check their links.
They’ve got a whole list leading to e-Bibles of various sorts, but as far as I can tell they’re all external sites. Could be there’s a DRM-free Bible in there somewhere; but as of this writing, not one for my Kindle, which was my original concern.
I’ll update further if the Crossway folks update me.
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Comments:
The ESV Bible is available on-line at their web site, but not in a downloadable format.
Since they were set up to distribute the Bible as widely as possible, and own the full rights to the translation, a free version for download would make sense.
There are plenty of non-DRM Bibles out there (look to Gutenberg, for example), but the problem of course is…there are plenty of versions of the Bible. If you are looking for a specific translation, interpretation, edition, you might be SOL. But if you are willing to cast a wider net (fisher’s of men, get it, har, har), you can get a text file that you can convert to Mobipocket (DRM free) or get the same from a site that does the conversion for you (e.g., Manybooks).
In the wider sense…yes, making something that is supposed to be spreading “good news” DRM-locked is pretty dumb. Even pirates need to get the “good news”.
Of course, the “good news” pirates usually hear it, “Hey, guys, good news. We figured out how to crack this DRM.”
Paul (commenter #1) created a nice ebook of the King James bible in mobiread format. I downloaded it when I got my Cybook from http://idisk.mac.com/durrantsoftware-Public/KJV%20Bible.mobi but I don’t know if the link is still good though
I don’t get why you are harping on Crossway for this. They, like most other Christian publishers, are late-comers to the eBook market and are still trying to get it all worked out. They work with conversion companies to make their books into eBooks and distribute those through a separate distribution house. Most of the time, they are completely unaware of what their eBooks have or don’t have, and they don’t have the staff (in numbers or expertise) to do anything differently.
But why are you singling Crossway out? Why not talk about Zondervan’s iron grip on the NIV, or Tyndale’s NLT, or Lifeway’s HCSB?
These companies spend a lot of money developing these new Bible translations, and it is not surprising to me that they want to protect their investment. DRM makes sense to them from that perspective, especially if all they get from non-DRM advocates like us is complaints and public lashings.
Like Joshua I’m puzzled over your behavior regarding Crossway.
Many translations of the Bible are in the public domain and available from many sources in many formats. Some translations are copyrighted.
If one wants to get ahold of the KJV they can get it for free or pay for digital or print versions from a wide range of publishers.
Crossways owns the rights to the ESV and make it available in a variety of ways – some free of charge, some not.
Here’s some more info – http://www.esv.org/about/faq .
Why leave snarky reviews on amazon for their efforts? Do you plan to continue your crusade and leave similar comments for all the other Bible editions available in Kindle format?
My version of the KJV is still at that site, but there’s an updated version of it available at the mobileread web site, with a few fixes to the text and table of contents after comparison with some other sources.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22438
There are a few other version of the bible there, as well as, of course, several thousand nicely formatted public domain ebooks.
Joshua and HeavyG, Crossway came up because their free Bible download was featured on the official Amazon Kindle blog. A quick search on Amazon reveals 50 Kindle Bibles of varying prices, some as cheap as $0.99. As it stands, Crossway’s is the only one that’s free. And the only one that’s specifically been mentioned on the Amazon Kindle blog since I’ve been a subscriber.
It just struck me as somewhat ironic that a free Bible isn’t in fact “free”. Particularly when one considers the content of the Bible (or the Gospels, anyway) and Crossway’s stated mission to bring folks to the Savior – by locking up the Bible. As you say, the ESV is available in other formats – but not for the Kindle – which was the source of my original post to begin with.
The argument that DRM makes sense to them because they’ve spent a lot of money producing it is the same argument the big publishers use, and the music industry, and Hollywood. Of course they have the righ to go ahead and produce all the DRMed stuff they want. It’s a bad idea for all the usual reasons which aren’t necessary to repeat here. And in this case, antithetical to the Christian mission, or so it seems to me. My hope is that Crossway takes the bold step into non-DRM-land rather than just joining the ranks of outmoded DRMers.
I should add that I think Crossway is operating in good faith here; they’re just not up to speed. As has been discussed around here and as I have found in my use of the Kindle, because of its very set-up, anything you put on the Kindle is locked-up, regardless of whether it started out DRM-free or not, unless you do some hacking around. The real culprit here is Amazon, I think, and I’ve said as much to the folks at Crossway.
Paul, thanks for the link. There are lots of digital version of the Bible out there, as well as other holy and historical texts. The readability of these varies. For the record, and as I mentioned in the comments on the first post, the Crossway version is eminently readable and easy-to-use.
I disagree with your religious argument. The ESV is being sold on the Kindle Store, not on the Mobipocket store. It is being sold to users of the Kindle, not to users of other software. Crossway has developed other options for other people, and I am sure they are working on making the ESV available in other formats. Why not be happy they are making the Bible free at all?
Again, I think you are harping on the wrong group. Why not rail about the fact that the other 49 Bibles in the Kindle store are not free? Why not make a stink over their DRM? Singling out one company that had the guts to make their text available for free in the first place, and bringing them public shame in multiple blog posts is what I see as antithetical to Christian teachings.
Joshua, As I said, I did download their free Bible, and I think it’s laudable; and I’ll reiterate that I think ultimately the problem lies with Amazon, not Crossway. I’m not sure how “gutsy” their move was, though; the ESV wasn’t free before and it’s likely to not be free again – seems like a pretty standard marketing tactic. Which is how they got featured on the Kindle blog, which is how I found out about it, which is how all this got started. The other DRMed Bibles aren’t relevant, per se. Although maybe I’ll look into it one of these times.
In any case, I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Thanks for your comments.