YouVersion of the Bible

Hey Look, Yet Another Online Bible Study Site.

Promising to fill a gap left by sites like eBible and BibleGateway, a new Bible reading and study site is online, called the YouVersion. It is being created by lifechurch.tv.

Like eBible, the YouVersion offers up a modern feel with highlighting and tagging. Unlike eBible, the YouVersion opens things up a bit by allowing users to attach multi-media content to passages.

The YouVersion blog does a decent job of highlighting new features as they appear.

The Good Stuff

• More Bible is a good thing, however you slice it.
• Attaching links, images, and video—in addition to text notes— to passages is a nice step forward.
• The layout is nice enough and uncluttered.
• Though not available yet, a Groups feature will allow groups (what else?) to study Scripture together.
• Also not available yet, a Favorites feature will allow you to mark Passages to appear in a list of your favorites.
• It nice that they opened the website when the Reader was ready and did not wait for everything to be available, but… (see below).
• Uploading images and videos is restricted to online sharing sites. Good because it probably will filter out a lot of unwelcome nastiness.

The Not-So-Good Stuff

• The Bible Reader always starts with Genesis 1. Likewise, no matter what you’re reading, refreshing the reading page always starts you back at Genesis 1. The last passage you were viewing should be remembered.
• Once you’ve added content, the Reader still shows a “Discover the relevancy… Currently, there is no passage selected” message. Once you select a passage, Community content for that verse is displayed. I would expect that my content is displayed first. Clicking on My Content shows a list of content, with no indication of which is relevant to the current verse. Very unhelpful.
• The Dashboard shows a bunch of stuff but nothing relevant to your own reading and content. The dashboard should first and foremost show what’s relevant to the user, starting with the user’s own work. The Community is secondary, and once groups are available, tertiary.
• There are still some layout bugs. For example, if your browser window isn’t huge, content links wrap back on themselves, creating a strange jumble. There seems to be a blank column at the end of each entry.
• The missing features leave big holes in the YouVersion concept.
• Uploading images and videos is restricted to online sharing sites. Bad because it forces you to use yet another website.
• There needs to be at least an option to render Jesus’ words in red.
• A sans-serif font is not so great for extended reading. An option to switch to a serif font like Georgia would ease reading. See below for a comparison of this.
• Apparently, there is no public API into YouVersion for developers to build on YouVersion. ESV and eBible both have APIs.

Georgia On My Mind

Reading for a while in the YouVersion reading pane is visually tiresome for me, so I opened Firebug and changed the Scripture font from Arial to Georgia. Much better!

Though font preferences differ among readers, but there is some evidence that serif fonts provide superior readability than do their sans-serif cousins for longer passages of text. I mostly agree and feel that YouVersion (and eBible, for that matter) should include an option to change the text font to a modern serif font like Georgia. (Of course, titles and headings can and should remain in sans-serif.)

Below are two clipped screenshots of John 15 in YouVersion. The first is set in Arial, followed by the same text rendered in Georgia.

Sans-serif (Arial) – click for full image

Serif (Georgia) – click for full image

Your mileage may vary of course. Just asking that we have a choice.

Features and Screenshots

YouVersion Dashboard and Profile

The Dashboard displays some welcome messages, a daily reading, recent Community contributions, new users, an entry from their blog, a search box, and some links to various areas of the site (most are “coming soon”). Does not show anything directly relevant to the user. The profile feels perfunctory, but also shows who you’re “following,” who’s “following” you, your contributions, and what you’ve tagged and starred.

YouVersion Bible Reader and Community Content

Though always returning you to Genesis 1, the Bible Reader has a nice enough layout. Clicking on a verse displays community content rather than your own content.

YouVersion My Content and Adding An Image

Clicking “My Content” shows a list of content you’ve added with no indication of which is relevant to this verse. Adding content is pretty simple. Fill in the form and point it to a Flickr, Picasa, or Photobucket image. Pretty much the same for

YouVersion, Shared Content, and Community Bible Study

Making the Bible available to more people and providing them with more tools with which to study it is a great thing. Once it’s completed, I can see some Bible study groups making great use of YouVersion and its community and group features.

The obvious purpose of YouVersion is to apply the latest web technologies to an online Bible study application. Much of the “latest web technologies,” though, is nothing more than hype and fashion. Ajax and Javascript are nice incremental points on the long timeline of technology, but let’s get some perspective. The first post in their blog seems to equate Web 2.0 fashion sense with the invention of the printing press and, presumably, lifechurch.tv with Gutenberg.

Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450. Four years later, he printed the first copy of the Bible using this new moveable type system. This accomplishment began what is known as “The Age of the Printed Book.” Over the following centuries, this technological advancement revolutionized the surrounding culture by making it possible for the Bible to be accessible to nearly everyone.

Currently, we are in the beginning of another revolution that is defined by the ability for almost anyone to publish content and quickly distribute it worldwide using the Internet. This revolution is at the center of what is called “Web 2.0.”

A revolution on par with the printing press? That’s a bit much.

Unfortunately, though lifechurch.tv may be well-intended, I get a sense that something deeper is missing in YouVersion. Maybe that will change as the project nears completion.

Shared Content and Community

The ability to link Scripture to other content and share notes is interesting and will benefit to some Bible study groups and individuals. Tagging and starring passages provide helpful organizational tools that some will find useful. These features can make YouVersion a great asset to study and reading, particularly if the interface is improved to highlight the user’s own work first and by default.

In Summary

LifeChurch has done a decent job with YouVersion, and aside from nagging problems, it is a promising work-in-progress that may be a valuable tool in the future.

However, something is missing. Whether they work the kinks out or not, YouVersion seems to have started with Web 2.0 talking points and worked backwards to work them around the Bible. Tagging? Got it. Starring? Check. Community? Yep. Shared content? Oh, yeah. Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, MySpace? Got it. This Ajax thing? You betcha. DHTML and highlighting? Yes sir. The focus seems to be all that rather than on the Bible itself.