As we saw in the last Q&A post there are quite a few benefits to electronic books, and we certainly saw that there are some real benefits - particularly in the area of time spent searching through books and spreading your library out in front of you on a table or desk.

Unlike physical books however, as technology advances, so does the electronic book technology and the book reader technology.  How do our four software companies work with books in this sense?

Question: What guarantees do you give to customers that books purchased today will continue to work in five years time?

Olive Tree:

Olive Tree is committed to supporting popular handheld platforms as they continue to come on the market. We have developed a cross-platform technology that allows us to more easily move our products to new platforms.  Olive Tree also has a history of offering  Bibles and study tools for almost ten years across a variety of mobile devices. Our product set and supported platforms only continue to grow. We have a current transfer policy that lets customers transfer files they have purchased to a new device, even if the operating system changes. Also, we still make available a limited number of products that will work with the very original Palm devices (the Handspring Visor for example), so this also speaks well of our continued support of older platforms

Laridian:

None. Don't accept any other answer from any other Bible software company.

However, we've been in business for almost ten years now and our file format has changed very little. More importantly, we have a complete record of everything you've ever purchased from us. I'm looking at a customer here who placed an order in December, 1998 that included our Bible software and the NIV Bible. That customer could come to our site today and re-download those products at no charge. Now, it's highly unlikely they still have a device that would run that software. But if they did, they could install it and it would work.

Furthermore, if that customer upgrades from our old version 1 software to the latest version 3, they would be able to download a version of the NIV compatible with version 3 even though their original NIV is no longer compatible with the new version. We handle this automatically at our site.

eSword:

Assuming their hardware still works in five years, then there is no reason why their investment would be compromised.  Users can always retrieve their purchased resources if they lose them for any reason, or upgrade their hardware, etc.

Logos:

We don’t charge for upgrades to the viewing engine, and our users have not had to re-purchase titles for more than 12 years.

BibleTechnology.com:

So far so good - each electronic Bible publisher here will allow you to download new versions of the books as you need to.  Logos is a little different - they build their software to be able to read the old books, so you just download the new viewing engine and then read the old books with them.  This raises the question - what happens to customers when the technology moves forward - do they have to buy everything again?  We asked the question specifically:

Question: How does a user migrate between revisions of your software? What costs are involved and how do you set these?

Olive Tree:

Updates to our software (both BibleReader and text updates) are currently free, including a free upgrade across different device operating systems. All a user has to do is login to their account on our site, and download updated files from their Personal Library.

Laridian:

The process of migration from one major version to the next varies from platform to platform and version to version. Prices also vary. We charge a nominal price for our software and upgrades are at a discount from that price. You don't have to re-purchase any content (Bibles and reference books) that you already own; you just have to upgrade the software.

eSword:

Upgrades are always free as is the program itself.

Logos:

We have an update feature built into the product, and free updates can be downloaded from our web site as well. The latest version of the software platform is always included on the CD or DVD-ROM with new electronic books, too, and automatically installs when appropriate.

BibleTechnology.com

So the technology question does seem to be well managed by these companies.  Each allowing either free or negligible upgrade prices as technology changes.  While Laridian is the only company that charges for the reader software, the price of this software is only $10.00-$19.99, which in our estimation is reasonable - particularly considering the reader software doesn't change versions more than once every two to three years.