Imagine, if you will, that you bought a cloud-enabled toaster. And that one day, you got a sudden in-home upgrade to three toast slots from two. Then, just as suddenly, the new feature addition was rolled back. So you were left with two slots and some smushed toast. And then your toaster decided it wanted to start serving orange juice…
The quote above is from an article at GigaOM where a Harvard Law professor (Jonathan Zittrain) questioned the value of closed platforms on cloud-enabled services. The article points to cloud computing and some mobile devices, but I want to highlight one area in particular – Bible software – as the closed platform that’s more likely to burn people, rather than keep them openly nourished.
I was told once that the current model of Bible software (dedicated readers and an inability to take books from one reader platform to another) is needed for the industry to survive. But I have never believed this. Personally, I think its a cop-out to a model of business that just doesn’t fit the intentions of the Internet as a medium for commerce and information sharing. Its a hearken back to the times when there was only one source for learning and others needed to be approved by Rome to carry the scroll… teaching was a whole other certification process.
And yet this is where we are. Logos on desktop and web and mobile. YouVersion web and mobile. Laridian mobile and mobile and mobile some more. Palm Bible+ on one mobile. And on and on. Publishers enable this through collecting licensee fees from developers and users alike (you didn’t think you were actually getting the Bible did you; you are purchasing a license to read it, not own it). The market allows this, and we sit by because…
The features within these applications are chosen on the basis of need and market targeting. Some applications are more academic and have features befitting those audiences, others have features more for casual reading, and others still are a hodge-podge of features with no clear audience or goal. Regardless of the feature, they all serve the Bread of the Word. The same bread (content) in most cases. And yet, unlike the bread in your toaster, you can’t just go to your neighbor’s house and use their open source toaster to read your WordSearch-branded bread. You must toast it by WordSearch’s toaster only. To me that’s closed, and makes absoutely no sense given the intelligence and innovation that these Bible companies have at their disposal towards creating something… open, innovative, not necessarly free, but definitely sharable.
At some point, Amazon Kindle owners are going to want to move on past Amazon’s system of ebooks and use others (Borders, Barnes and Nobles, an independent bookseller, etc.) And it will take all manners of governmental, private, and public pressure to get Amazon to open up. But nothing will change until those who are effected most will want to change it.
Which is why I think that for all the truth in the point that Bible software should be open to any device, any platform, at any time – where users purchase a license and can use it legally anywhere – we aren’t going anywhere. At the intersection of faith and mobile technology, developers and users alike have forgotten to leave the cross (chains of locked platforms and marketing models) behind, and resurrect to something shared and usable by all. Nothing at all like how Jesus example was/is, nothing at all like moving forward past a locked intersection.
And that’s ok, we have to protect the way things were – its only toast right?
Post-Script:: Eight (8) hours after composing this post, the Wall Street Journal published this article; I’m totally not the only one with these feelings about ebooks. This is a major issue that needs to be addressed by the entire industry, not just in the religious texts realm. The question is really simple though: is the Body going to be a point of innovation in technology here, or are we going to continue to follow the secular world with something we could do a lot better given our spiritual insight? I would hope innovation comes from the Body here, but I’ve been burnt by that expectation many times before.