Occasionally on this blog, I like to post programs and apps that are helpful to me in my study of the Bible. I posted about my library and Zotero some time ago, and slightly more recently about a great flashcard program called Mnemosyne. In a similar vein, I learned a cool trick with Logos recently that I would like to share.
First, a disclaimer. From what I can tell by reading the Logos EULA and browsing their forums, this is perfectly legal as long as you do not send the end result to anyone's Kindle but your own. From what I gather, you are free to use your purchased Logos content in a variety of ways as long as you only use it personally. It is a little more complex than I make it sound, to be sure, so be certain not violate you own conscience. (For more, see Logos CEO Bob Pritchett's response to this question).
I got the idea to try and figure out how to do this from an incredibly interesting Kickstarter project that I saw a couple of weeks ago. The idea was to make reading the Bible like reading other books. By removing the tiny print, verse numbers, footnotes, and chapter divisions, it makes the experience of reading the Bible more like reading other books (in a good way). Check out the project here. If I had any spare funds, I would certainly support it.
Before you get started, if you have an older version of Logos, be sure to update to Logos 5 for free (super cool, right!?!). Once that is finished, it's a relatively easy process to turn your Kindle into a long-form Bible Reading tool.
Once you open Logos, go to "Tools" and under "Passage" click on "Copy Bible Verses." There are three things you need to do in the fields that say "Copy [format] from [version/book] to [program]." The last two are the easiest. For the version, I picked the ESV, but you can select any Bible that you would like to read from (including Greek, though I don't think the Kindle yet supports Hebrew). For the program, you just select your word processor (for me, that is Word).
Setting up the format is a bit trickier. There are several presets, but none of them fit what I wanted. Fortunately, Logos allows you to make your own. There are a lot of settings, but I ended up with the following:
%NoCharFormatting
%NoRedLetter
%NoFootnotes
%NoCitation
%UseBibleParagraphs
=ForEachVerse
[VerseText]
Basically, this give you just the Bible text in paragraph form. The end result will look like this:
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| Don't forget to add the book title to the beginning of the doc |
After you have a format you like, open your desired word processor, type the section you want to copy, and hit enter. It seems best to copy about half a dozen chapters at a time, depending on how much data you can fit on your computers "clipboard."
Once it is in Word, format it how you would like it to appear (I prefer single-spaced, 1/2" paragraph indents, no spaces after paragraph, justified text) and save it. I am doing each book separately, so I created a folder under "my documents" in which to store them. You may want to save them with a number before the book title (e.g. 01 Genesis) so they stay in order.
After you have your document properly set up, you have to find your Kindle's email address (detailed instructions from Amazon here). You simply got to "Your Account" and click "Manage Your Content and Devices." Click on "Your Devices" and select the devise you would like the document sent to. Once selected, your kindle's email address will be displayed with some other info.
The last (and easiest) step is to send an email to the email address with the document you just created as an attachment. Once that's done, sync your Kindle and you're good to go. Let me know in the comments section if you have any question or if you found this helpful.
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| Poetic lines are indented using the settings above, which is nice. |
