Responding to a friend’s email, we were asked what might be some of the best multi-lingual digital libraries? First, a small listing, then some reasoning to why this isn’t a separate page on this site (unlike the way we’ve done apps, resources, and services).

• Christian Classics Etherial Library
• Digital Bible Society
• Distant Shores Media (see Open Bible Stories and Door43)
• Faith Comes By Hearing
• Global Recording Networks (see 5fish.mobi)
• Jesus Film Project
• Logos
• Mission Aviation Fellowship (see Estante)
• Open Church
• Project Gutenburg
• TWR (Thu the Bible and LinguaDMS are key here)
• Wycliffe
• YouVersion/LifeChurch.TV (apps, online church, etc.)
• and scores of Bible societies and publishers doing work in this space, usually with one or more of the above orgs

Reasons Why This Isn’t A Separate Page

When this question was asked, I remembered a conversation with the late WS Keel as to why this wasn’t out there already? Why is it that people have to search  far and hard to find a semblance of a library of digital content that works with various connected and mobile devices? My answer to him was quite simple: “a digital library is of no good use when there’s nothing to read it on.” MMM took the approach of pointing to mobile containers for this content. And left it to the greater digital-enabled Body to develop the hooks to connect content into these and former relevant media spaces.

The other reason that you don’t see this as a separate page is that there’s really not much in they way of local content except by a few providers. When you speak of audio content, much of it comes through Faith Comes By Hearing. They really are the leaders of audio biblical resources in this respect. That also means that if there’s work being done, its either under their umbrella, or overshadowed by the legal and logistical issues of being a small fish in a big pond.

Lastly, and most importantly, the legal issues. Instead of writing this again, I recommend the Copyright and the Kingdom (slideshow, PDF) from Tim Jore of Distant Shores Media.

Now, if there’s enough buzz from this post (probably from those libraries that I’ve missed), to make this a page to itself, I’ll do it. But, until the Body gets it together in several facets, we’ll continue to have a hard go of things finding not just multi-lingual Christian resources, but simply finding resources at all.

Content Submission

If you create content and would like to submit it for inclusion into any of these libraries, let me recommend that you do so to open libraries such as Open Bible Stories, Project Gutenberg, and Open Church. Its not that the others aren’t good, its just that they aren’t open to all of the world (yet).