eBible.com Review

I found out about this new website earlier this week called eBible. It’s “A new approach to the Bible. Easy to use, understand and share the goodness.” I’ve used BibleGateway primarily the past couple of years for my online Bible resources, and I like it, but I wanted to give this a try since it uses AJAX and also seems a lot less cluttered. Right now the site is in Beta, so you have to have an invite to join in on the fun. Once you are a member, you get one invite to send to a friend (I’ve already given mine away).

As you can see, the home page is very simple, yet gives you everything that you need.

To keep it simple, here is what I like about this site:

1. The use of AJAX makes things a lot simplier. For instance, when I change translations, it just changes that section and doesn’t refresh the whole page (which of course is one of the benefits of using AJAX). I can also mouse over the scroll bar and the passage moves up and down without clicking.

2. In BibleGateway, when I search for one particular verse I get just that verse. You have the option of the whole chapter or use in context, but not by default. I like that in eBible, I have the entire chapter there, but the passage I searched for is highlighted.

3. Another cool thing is the commentary in the sidebar to explain things about the passage. There are a couple of popular dictionaries, commentaries and encylopedias that you can set as your default when searching for those. I would hope that they will be able to add more in the future. There are a couple in each category that you have access to, and a couple under dictionaries and encyclopedias that you can select “add to library” and you have the option of paying to add an electronic copy to your library to use.

The “Answers” and “Products” links give you just that. Answers will give you answers to topics from the books in their library such as Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Dictionary, or What does the Bible Say About….

There is also a forum for users to make feature requests, report bugs and ask questions.

Here is the downside:

1. Right now there are only five translations. NCV, KJV, NKJV, The Message and NASB. Granted these are five major ones, but I think leaving out NIV and NLT was a major oversight since NIV is the most popular translation and NLT is in the top 5 (at least when this article was written). For me personally, I’d like to see the ESV. However, since the site is new, I would expect more translations to be added very soon.

2. While not a big deal to me, BibleGateway is available in English and Spanish. As far as I know, eBible is just available in English.

3. BibleGateway has a lot more to offer as far as resources, reading plans, etc…but I don’t think the goal is to be a BibleGateway. Depending on what you are looking for would make a difference in what site works best for you.

4. There are some bugs to be worked out. For instance, according to the forum, Song of Solomon isn’t showing up in a search. Instead you have to search for “Son 1:1″ or “Song 1:1″ to find it.

What I would like to see:

1. More translations of course.

2. A way of tagging certain verses for your own personal use, but also in the same way that Del.icio.us so that you can see what others are tagging verses as well and search for topics that way. Just making it more user interactive in general.

3. Lastly, I think a Wiki would be a nice feature to get more user explainations on different verses or topics and to share different resources available.

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