Every book in the ESV Study Bible has an introduction like this one, providing you essential information to enrich your study of God’s Word.

Learn more about the ESV Study Bible, sign up for email newsletters, and get a pre-order discount at www.ESVStudyBible.org.

The 35% pre-order discount ends this Thursday, May 15th, 2008.

Listen to samples at CBD. It’s also available from Amazon and other stores.

Photo by Scott Kay. More Deluxe Compact Bible photos.

Here are the available editions:

Classic Reference

ESV Classic Reference TruTone (Chestnut, Eternity Design). ISBN 9781433502330.

Personal Size Reference

ESV Personal Size Reference TruTone (Navy/Khaki/Pearl, Horizon Design). ISBN 9781433502354.

ESV Personal Size Reference TruTone (Forest/Tan, Trail Design). ISBN 9781433502361.

Single Column Reference

ESV Single Column Reference TruTone (Brown/Cordovan, Portfolio Design). ISBN 9781433502378.

Thinline

ESV Thinline TruTone (Brick, Crossroads Design). ISBN 9781433502323.

Jerry shares a few caveats about the reviews:

First, I have a specific user in mind when I write my reviews: Me. A lay person who is interested in Bible software for personal study and teaching, yet does not have extra time or money. That’s not to say that a full-time pastor or seminary student wouldn’t benefit from these reviews, or wouldn’t agree with my conclusions, only that I did not have them in mind when I tested each product.

For instance, I did not test a product’s Greek and Hebrew tools. All of the products reviewed provide basic Greek and Hebrew texts and word lookups. Some of them offer much deeper Greek and Hebrew studies, but I did not explore those options.

It also means I didn’t test every feature of each product. I just wanted to give a solid overview of basic functionality and usefulness, concentrating on the features that are useful and interesting to me.

Second, I did my best to provide accurate reviews; but in the end these are just my opinions. If you enjoy one of the packages that I rated low, then more power to you. Use what you like and be proud of it. I welcome dialog and disagreement, provided the discourse is civil. A location for comments on these reviews is provided at this blog entry.

A few people have already shared some good comments about the reviews, and Jerry has been quick to respond.

Via Biblical Studies and Technological Tools.

This month features Jill Parr, Shannon Ethridge, one about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others.

Listen to all 296 spots at www.bibleforlife.org.

These are just a few of the reasons I choose to preach from the ESV. If you attend Living Hope Church, do you need to rush out and purchase another Bible? Absolutely not. Keep reading the Bible you love. But if you’re interested in checking out something new, I’d recommend giving the ESV a look. All the versions mentioned above are perfectly fine for devotional reading…. Many other churches across the nation are making the switch [to the ESV] as well.

And last but absolutely not least, what would this list be without a reference to the greatest and most influential classic of them all which can be read and listened to in its entirety for free online? At esv.org you can both read and listen to the Bible, from cover to cover, for free. Simply click the chapter you want to read/hear and at the top of the passage click the word listen and it will automatically start playing. This is a wonderful, beautiful gift that ESV has given to us. Naturally, as a Christian I find explicit and unequivocal value in the reading or hearing of the Bible. However, even if you are not a Christian, the Bible has decidedly been one of the most, if not the most influential book in all of history for many reasons, including that it is the story from which much of ancient and modern literature has gleaned many of its plot-lines and therefore should be read by all as literature if nothing else. I remember even having to read portions of it for my Advanced Placement English class at my public high school.

You can listen to the ESV for free; you can also buy an MP3 download of the ESV (read by Max McLean) if you want to hear the Bible even when the Internet isn’t available.

Also, look for a new audio recording of the ESV this fall—online and on CD.

The blue lines show quotes from people, and the light red lines show quotes from God and Jesus. The full-size graphic reduces words to a single pixel and uses lines to indicate sentence length.

A closeup of the book of Joshua looks like this:

The long lines in the lower left corner show the catalog of kings and lands in Joshua 12 and 13, punctuated by a discourse from God (the red lines). The lighter dots show all the proper names in the catalog.

This kind of visualization may not lead to huge insights, but it provides a new way for people to interact with texts. As an OpenBible.info blog post notes, interactivity would make these visualizations a lot more useful.

The visualization makes use of some datasets we have. The quote colors come from the Bible Quote Speakers dataset that we made with Mechanical Turk. The proper-name colors come from our Proper Names dataset, which catalogs and categorizes all the proper names in the ESV. Both datasets are now available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Does this kind of dataset excite you? Check out the biblical-names-database Google Group, which aims to create a unified address space for biblical names. UBS has already donated two massive datasets. We’d certainly be happy to see our two datasets above added to this group’s data.

Stefanie Posavec’s visualizations of On the Road inspired this visualization. Crossway staff assisted in its production.

Mark writes:

When you consider how much I like small Bibles, it’s no surprise that the iPhone-as-Bible appeals to me. It’s the Bible I carry when I’m not carrying a Bible. Personally, I don’t like having a bunch of little devices to carry, so in the past I tended to leave digital cameras, music players, etc., behind. A cell phone is the only pocket device I’ve had the discipline to carry pretty much always. Because I can now read the Bible on my phone, I almost always have Scripture handy, no matter where I happen to be.

Mark has hit on something about using technology for religious purposes: you have to design it so people will use it. Susan P. Wyche, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, has been pursuing research along these lines. (See, for example, her IxDA talk about using sketches to capture the “consumption and appropriation of technology by evangelical Christians” in Kenya.) Prefiguring Mark, Susan and her colleagues sketched a leather-covered mobile phone for use in worship:

Academic research that explores the intersection of faith and technology is important for both product designers and religious publishers—technology, especially mobile technology, is spreading around the world and people are starting to incorporate it into worship.