At the 2009 GYC convention, I was introduced to a new application for the iPhone and iPod touch that features Ellen White’s writings, called PocketBible. Unlike the Conflict of the Ages app I reviewed some time ago, this one contains all of the books (or at least the major ones) written by Ellen White. I counted 119 books in all. This is obviously a major advance over the five books included with Conflict of the Ages.
The base app, PocketBible, is developed by a company called Laridian. This app is FREE. However, PocketBible is mainly just a shell for library modules that you download. Some of these are free or included, but others — such as the Ellen White writings — cost money. (Most of their libraries are Bible translations and such.)
You cannot, apparently, buy the Ellen White library from Laridian. I got mine directly from the White Estate booth at GYC. However, I could not find any information about the Ellen White library for this app on the Ellen White Estate website. They definitely carry the product, because I am using it now on my iPod touch. My guess is that you just need to contact them for information about how to buy a serial number. Once you register the serial number on the Laridian website, you then enter your customer identification in the PocketBible app, and the whole collection downloads automatically. It’s best to do this with a wifi connection, because it’s quite a large download.
Personally I found the interface a little confusing. It’s not as elegant as the Conflict of the Ages app, but it’s functional. Personally I found the method of turning pages awkward. But some people might prefer it. It’s mainly a matter of taste.
The app is fully searchable. However, it only searches one library at a time. In some ways this is good, because you usually don’t want a search to be pulling words from all the different Bibles and commentaries. However, when I first started using the app, it appeared that you could only search White’s writings book by book. In other words, you might open Sons and Daughters of God and search that. Obviously that would be very limiting. However, I learned that the key is to open the library called “EGW-BKS” (in the Other Books section of the app), and searching in this library searches all the books simultaneously.
Here is a screen shot showing a search results listing:
And this shot shows what the content looks like. Note that the Bible verse references are clickable, which is quite cool:
If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, it’s definitely the best thing out there for accessing Ellen White’s writings.
Tags: Ellen White, iPhone, iPod Touch
Thanks for your review of PocketBible and the Ellen G White collection of books. I thought I’d clarify a couple of things for your readers.
First, PocketBible is a stand-alone product that we created for Bible study. We’ve been doing Bible study software for mobile devices for over 10 years now and have hundreds of Bibles and Bible reference books available for PocketBible at our Web site, http://www.laridian.com.
One of our products is called BookBuilder and allows an individual or a publisher to create and distribute electronic titles that are compatible with PocketBible. The EG White Estate used this tool to create this collection of books, which they distribute independently of us.
Second, the reason there might be a little weirdness when using this collection with PocketBible is that the person who created the books felt it was necessary to do a couple things: First is to put a large collection of books all inside of one book to make it easier to manage the entire collection at once. So rather than 119 little books you have one big one.
Also he wanted to retain the page numbers of the original printed books. We don’t provide a way to do this, so he tagged the book as if it was a dictionary. When you enter an abbreviation and page number, like “LDE 195″ in the “Look Up” field (normally used for looking up words in a dictionary), it takes you to page 195 in the book “Last Day Events”. Obviously if someone were writing an app dedicated to White’s writings, they would make this functionality work a little more elegantly, but the White Estate was trying to work with existing Bible study software to minimize their cost.
PocketBible for iPhone is an evolving app, so new features are being added all the time. One of the features on the to-do list is the ability to search your entire library at one time. Of course since the app is free and is distributed on the App Store, when new functions like this are implemented they are downloaded automatically to your iPhone or iPod touch at no cost.
Thanks again for the nice review.
Craig Rairdin
President
Laridian, Inc.
Thanks for the feedback, Craig. I look forward to seeing how this app develops!
Thanks for telling us about this, Michael. How much did the EGW books cost? And (more importantly) how much room did they take??
Thanks!
Laurel
Laurel,
I got a “special deal” on my app, so I don’t really know how much it costs. Sorry!
As far as room, the app itself takes a measly 5MB, but then the app downloads the EGW data, and there is not a clear way to tell how much data a particular app uses. If I had been more on the ball, I could have done a before and after test, but it’s too late for that. However, I can see that the amount of space for “Other” on my iPod touch (which is presumably the amount of application data, but I don’t know for sure) is about 325 MB. So I’d say the EGW data takes up some amount of space less than that. I have many apps installed, so it’s hard to estimate or guess.
EGW-7A 1.3MB (SDA Bible Commentary Vol 7a – EG White Comments)
EGW-AG 590KB (God’s Amazing Grace)
EGW-BIO 3.8MB (Ellen G. White 6 Vol. Biography)
EGW-BKS 46MB (Ellen G. White Writings eBook Collection)
EGW-BLJ 640KB (To Be Like Jesus)
EGW-CC 590KB (Conflict and Courage)
EGW-CTr 670KB (Christ Triumphant)
EGW-FLB 582KB (The Faith I Live By)
EGW-HP 600KB (In Heavenly Places)
EGW-LHU 707KB (Lift Him Up)
EGW-Mar 600KB (Maranatha)
EGW-ML 530KB (My Life Today)
EGW-MOTL 1.4MB (Messenger of the Lord)
EGW-MR 9.7MB (Manuscript Releases)
EGW-OFC 590KB (Our Father Cares)
EGW-OHC 580KB (Our High Calling)
EGW-RC 710KB (Reflecting Christ)
EGW-SD 540KB (Sons and Daughters of God)
EGW-TDG 640KB (This Day With God)
EGW-TMK 570KB (That I May Know Him)
EGW-UL 690KB (The Upward Look)
EGW-YRP 580KB (Ye Shall Receive Power)
I’ve been using this app for a couple of months now, and I really love it! The guys at Laridian have done a wonderful job with it! One of my favorite parts of the app is where you can turn on Synchronization which allows you to look up a passage in the Bible (you could be following along in a sermon, or just in your own personal Bible Study) and then, if you have the right books open, you can compare other translations, see scholarly commentary, and even see EGW’s comments on that passage all at the flick of a finger. Amazing!
My only complaint at this point is that you currently can’t highlight or add notes to the EGW books. I hope to see this added soon, as I use notes and highlighting on the Bible all the time and would love to be able to do this with EGW’s writings as well.
The developers are active and so I have high hopes for this app as it continues to be improved. I recommend this app to all my iPhone/iTouch friends as the best Bible app out there for iPhone. Once you get used to the awkward navigation, you really can do so much!
Has anyone heard word from the White Estate as to when this will be publicly available? They are releasing a CD-ROM with iPhone, Palm, and Windows Mobile versions, I understand.
Incidentally, if you purchased to last Windows Mobile version and registered it online, you will be able to download the iPhone version from Laridian.