When I bought my Sony I wrote to the Help address on the SCRIPTURES CD and asked if the Church had the scriptures in a compatable format – they wrote back and told me to cut and paste from the CD, so that’s what I’m doing, and I’m posting the files on my website as I complete formatting each volume – if you have a Sony, please download and enjoy. I have other files of interest to the LDS reader as well.

As far as lds.org goes, this will allow more content in a more timely manner, and easier to use also.

But given the scale of what is available for free, I learned that Amazon is not too happy about it, in fact they are suing Google and Sony over this and their alliance, calling it ‘anticompetitive’. Just a ploy to boost its own sales, there really hasn’t been any viable option to the Kindle until now, although others are coming.

Let’s look at (at least how I understand it) what the IT folks at the Church offices are trying to do: In both the genealogical domain as well as in the gospel library context, the Church is trying to provide an infrastructure that others can build on. If the church provides the XML encoded data for the entire gospel library (scriptures, manuals, magazines, etc.) then conversion to your favorite reader format (something that runs on Windows Mobile or an iphone, or a Sony reader, another cell phone, etc.) can be done once somebody writes an appropriate translator.

What I’m really excited about and (and I have questions regarding) with this technology are the potential mash ups that will result from this kind of work. Individuals will be able to build web applications that serve up weekly curriculum resources to a single page. For example, a ward curriculum applications can serve up the Sunday school and priesthood reading assignments and primary lessons as well as related media content (images, songs, etc.) from the library that support those lessons. Gospel doctrine students will be able to take advantage of mapping mashups to get a geographic feel for the locations of church history events and revelations, as well as occurrances in the old and new testaments. If the scripture references in conference talks are encoded in the xml files, it becomes easier to create an experience similar to scriptures.byu.edu.

The great thing is, the limited IT staff at Church Offices doesn’t need to develop these applications alone. Once the infrastructure is laid, members will be able to work on these projects (probably through forums like tech.lds.org).

With all this potential, is the church going to provide guidelines for repurposing the gospel library content, or are we going to see a “let’s make this available to the members and see what they do with it” approach?