The Age of Engagement

One of the greatest changes that the internet enables is for people in different places to have a relationship with one another through the online, digital world. People can now find others who are interested in just about any specific topic, including a particular book or author, and form communities online around that interest. This is old news -- discussion groups are, with email, among the oldest uses of the internet (see, e.g., Google Groups, which incarnates Usenet).

What is a more recent development, though, is the use of online social services -- most notably Facebook -- to maintain one's online social life.

This climate means every author, every book, and every type of Bible, can be the focus for an online community. Sadly, publishers have been a bit slow on the uptake -- they have not recognized the opportunity or participated in helping to make this a reality.

Even though I'm not particularly a fan of the Huffington Post, I did appreciate and agree with some of the comments along these lines that Arianna Huffington made at Tools of Change in February, in her keynote address (insight in digital publishing knows no political boundaries). Here are the relevant graphs:

"Books don't end with the printed page. Books are conversation starters. That's really what we can do online better than anywhere else."

"The more we resist the change, the more we try to go back to some golden age that does not exist, the more we are missing the golden age that does exist right now, and that's the golden age of engagement. For the first time, news consumers and book readers don't just want to read, they want to engage with what they are reading. They want to talk back. They want to continue the conversation with friends on Facebook or let others know on Twitter what they're reading."

"Self-expression is the new entertainment.... People want to express themselves, to be part of the times we are living in -- whether it's politics or culture or entertainment, people want to heard, and now they can be heard.... And we need to celebrate that moment."

How can we "celebrate that moment" of opportunity for self-expression and social engagement online? Here are a few ideas of how we can help people express themselves and engage with others online while using digital Bibles:

• Personal Note-Taking. People ought to be able to take notes on what they are reading, and they ought to be able to share these notes with others as they see fit.
• Discussion Groups, both public and private. There ought to be a variety of discussion groups available, and people should be able to form their own private discussion groups and invite their friends.
• Integration with popular social-sharing sites (Facebook and others) -- sharing links and content, posting thoughts and reflections.
• Content feeds and widgets that people can use to post their own notes or content to other sites.

What do you think? How else can digital Bibles help people to express themselves and engage in relationships with others? Are there pitfalls that we have not discussed?

The Experience Era

One of the speakers at Tools of Change commented that we are coming into the "experience era." First we had the industrial era, then we have had the information era, now we're moving beyond that to an era in which people value experiences most highly.

I've been thinking about this idea and asking, What does a digital Bible for the experience era look like?

A digital Bible for the information era is information-oriented: It emphasizes access to information in and about the Bible. So search is a key function, as are passage lookup and topic guides.

What about an experience-oriented digital Bible? What are the elements of that? Here some things that come to mind:

An outstanding experience of reading the Bible text. Not only does the Bible text have to be present, but it has to be beautifully formatted, with an excellent design on screen, and fully accessible to people with disabilities. It has to look and feel good on all kinds of devices. [Difficulty: Moderate]

A thoughtful, uncluttered space for Bible journaling. Access to the journaling function needs to be very natural and easy from within the Bible text, and it needs to be given a clean, uncluttered interface. When people are journaling, they don't want to be looking at all kinds of gizmos and doodads in the interface. Instead, there needs to be an open space in which their thoughts and spirits can soar and roam. [Difficulty: Easy (techically), Hard (for business people to do)]

Personally-relevant additional content related to what I am reading. It's not terribly hard to gather together piles of content and link it all to the Bible text in various ways. What is much harder, but much more necessary, is to provide people, from that limitless pile, a selection of additional content that will be personally relevant and meaningful to them in light of their own experiences and context in life. Online shopping sites like Amazon have been doing something like this with books - when you put a book in your Amazon shopping cart, the site suggests some other things that you might be interested in. We need something similar in digital Bibles, but with content. Providing this for people will be technically very challenging. [Difficulty: Very Hard]

An enjoyable experience interacting with others. Not only should it be possible to interact with people in various ways, but there should be mechanisms to help ensure that the experience is beneficial. For example, I don't like the public notes feature in YouVersion, because it's cluttered with all kinds of unhelpful stuff. More helpful would be an ability to share notes with my Bible study group, and let us have conversations around each passage right in the digital Bible interface. [Difficulty: Moderately Hard]

An experience-oriented digital Bible cannot neglect the more information-oriented functionality, but gone are the days when information is enough. People are looking for a better experience than sifting through too many search results, seeing piles of irrelevant content in the interface, and having to look at a cluttered, ugly Bible interface. Doing this is not easy.

In other words, it's going to be much harder to provide people a pleasing experience in using digital Bibles, and the winners will be those, not who provide the most information, but those who provide the best experience.

Do you agree? Are there other things that are very important for an excellent experience? Would a better experience win you over the most information? What do you think?

Tools of Change 2010 Reviews

There are quite a number of good reviews of Tools of Change out. Here are a couple:

• http://booksquare.com/tools-change/
• http://www.forewordreviews.com/new-paths-publishers-were-display-tools-change-conference 
• http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2010/02/28/tools-of-change-thoughts-from-a-readers-perspective/
• http://www.publishingtrends.com/2010/02/lessons-from-oreilly-tools-of-change-for-publishing/
• http://blog.smashwords.com/2010/02/tools-of-change-conference-notes.html

With regard to digital Bibles specifically, Bob Pritchett from Logos was present, demonstrating Logos 4 and speaking on the theme that network effects support premium pricing. Although that specific presentation was not recorded, Bob had a short keynote on a similar theme that was, which you can watch here. (It's a 5-minute ignite talk. If you're not familiar with the ignite format, you can learn about it here.)