[sword-devel] Websites

[Chris Little]

On 4/10/2012 6:01 AM, Mike Hart wrote:
>  > CrossWire has never been involved in any palm apps.
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20040202044710/http://www.crosswire.org/crosswire/index.jsp
>
> I used a handspring visor. I've seen related posts about this, and I'm
> always a little confused why people would seek to change history. Did
> you mean Palm has never been supported by 'the sword project'? Again,
> we're talking about big and little umbrellas.

In my statement, I was precise and accurate. CrossWire has no 
association with PalmBible+ or UniBible other than linking to their 
websites. (To be complete, PalmBible+ may and UniBible does use some of 
our content after exporting it, but that wasn't done with our 
foreknowledge.) We link to them because they provide GPL Bible software 
for a platform that we don't otherwise support and have no intention of 
supporting via Sword or any other CrossWire project.

I'm not seeking to change history, as you suggest, just remembering it 
correctly. I really don't understand why you have linked to an Internet 
Archive page, either. We link to both PalmBible+ and UniBible on our 
live webpage: http://crosswire.org/applications.jsp?section=Handhelds

Realize that all of the above means that we have no control over modules 
used by PalmBible+ or UniBible, and we provide no content compatible 
with either of these programs.

> And this is exactly what my appeal is about. Crosswire is BIGGER than
> sword. a module repository should look like a bookstore, with each
> available app listed under each version of text. You want Croatian?
> Great, we got you covered on J2ME, iphone, windows 8, linux, Kindle,
> Ford's Fuse(whatever they call their car OS thing,) etc. Readers,
> Missionaries, don't want to chose a platform first then hope their
> chosen text is present. They know what text they want and besides the #1
> problem 'We don't have NIV', we should help them find what they're
> looking for.

I can only assume that you don't quite understand how publishing rights 
work. We're extremely lucky to be working in a particular sector of 
publishing where profits aren't the only objective of every rights 
holder. Some rights holders, indeed a great many of the rights holders 
we work with, are very liberal with the rights they grant us or even 
have no particular interest other than seeing their works maximally 
distributed. And we're lucky enough to work with a lot of worthwhile 
public domain material, as well.

In most cases, we should be very thankful to be able to distribute texts 
to all Sword front ends or even those plus Go Bible. Commercial 
publishers ordinarily would like more control over which platforms see 
their works, so it's not uncommon to see different rights and different 
prices applied to works distributed for different platforms. Within 
minor, mostly temporary exceptions, most of our upstream providers allow 
us to distribute their works to a wide array of platforms, usually free.

However, there will always be exceptions. There are legacy exceptions, 
since there was once a time when Go Bible was not under the fold of 
CrossWire, so we weren't pursuing rights to distribute in Go Bible's 
format. I imagine any rights holder who wished to sell a work would not 
be willing to distribute for Go Bible, since I don't believe it supports 
text unlocking. And there might be other reasons why a publisher would 
specifically wish to disallow distribution to a particular platform or 
front end. I think your assessment of the user's objective when viewing 
module offerings is completely wrong, given that it will never be the 
case that we can actually offer every work on every platform. Users are 
concerned with what is available to them for the software they are 
using, not what is available to other people on platforms they aren't using.

> ____________________
>
>  > TEI to LaTeX/PDF and EPUB (and accordingly MOBI, via Calibre) is
> trivial to do. Last semester I produced most of my course's readings in
> PDF, EPUB, & MOBI, from TEI P5 master documents so that students could
> use the reader of their choice. OSIS is /mostly/ just TEI, so you could
> either adjust the standard TEI XSLTs to take OSIS instead or convert the
> OSIS to TEI and use the stock TEI XSLTs themselves.
>
> ____________________
>
> I completely agree that for anyone on this list, getting any text onto
> an e-reader is trivial. However, 99.9% of the world does not have that
> knowledge, and getting homework, or Bible texts, onto a Kobo e-ink slate
> is beyond their competence. Which is why, again, Crosswire should be so
> much more than sword. Things that are too easy to worry about here are
> unknown or impossible for someone who knows 5 people using a kindle
> e-ink device that speak Chinese, leaving for the homeland in 2 weeks,
> and the discussion about Christ got to a point they would consider
> transporting a ZH text back with them.

I didn't write that on The SWORD Project news page. We don't publish 
OSIS docs, the KJV notwithstanding, so those are obviously not 
instructions for end users. If targeting ebook readers is important to 
you, the write the necessary XSLTs.

--Chris