The bible does not work well in an eBook format

The first book I bought after purchasing my Kindle2 was an NIV version of the Bible. Today I went in and submitted a review, which I must say, was not very positive. Even as I typed the review I became aware of the fact that perhaps it was not the book that failed as much as the platform. Then again, people need to know that their normal use pattern will need to change or they should stick with the traditional paper version.

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Did the hardware vendor, in this case Amazon, fail to fully understand how certain books are used and thus provide the ability for the author to implement? Or was it that the author simply didn’t go through the necessary work in order to properly catalog and tie the proper metadata/hierarchy/taxonomy?

My biggest gripe is the ability to find book chapter:verse reference through the “find” feature. Most times, if you are in a study or attending church, people will reference something like “John 16:28″ and expect that you can find it pretty quickly. If you do this within this book, you will not find anything. That on top of the failure of a navigation structure, means to find the “John 16:28″  takes 35 separate actions on my part:

• Click menu button
• Select “Table of Contents” (may have to use joystick)
• Push (down on stick)
• Use joystick (down 7 times)
• Push (down on stick)
• Select “John” by using joystick (down 6 times)
• Select “16″ (down on stick 4 down, 2 right)
• Push (down on stick)
• Select “28″ by using joystick (down 4 times, right 7 times)
• Push (down on stick)

So what now? You are in the book of John, chapter 16 verse 28, do you actually have any indication that you are there? Of course not.  There is no context awareness as to where you are within the body of a book (best example is chapter), only the display of what word or character count (and percent complete), indicated as “Locations”. You cannot jump ahead to each chapter without navigating back to the Table of Contents and hoping that the chapter is listed. This same problem carries over into search results; no indication of what book chapter:verse the item was located in.

I hope that as Amazon looks at the next multi-touch version of the Kindle(3?), that they include a better taxonomy awareness, allowing for a higher level of navigation and usability.

If I had designed a software application that required 35 actions to perform a task my Human Factors Engineering team would hang me up.

They can do better.

Now I am excited to see how my bible study uses a new live-blogging, live-sharing, live-questioning approach during sermons and studies from http://www.youversion.com (about). Imagine reading scripture together at the same time, on a web-enabled device, listening to the sermon over the web, and being able to ask questions during it that the pastor answers (live). This has potential.

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