eBible Launches New Bible App Focused on Encouraging Daily Scripture Reading
Christian App maker eBible has recently launched a free new Bible app currently available for iOS devices that focuses on encouraging Christians to read it on a daily basis.
“We want to focus on how we can help you stay committed to reading the Bible daily,” said eBible CEO Colin Wong to The Christian Post. “That’s really our mission. By taking the recent endeavor from a solo experience to a group experience, we hope to foster camaraderie and more importantly, accountability.”
The eBible app includes features to help users read and study the Bible in a group.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
It employs social networking-like features to help two or more users of the app to monitor each other’s progress and to ask and have questions answered regarding the scriptures.
eBible focuses less on the amount of content such as commentaries and devotionals in the app, and focuses more on enabling believers to read on a more consistent basis.
Wong once worked for Google and first built eBible as a personal electronic Bible for him to use.
He created it based on a desire to have an electronic Bible that was not packed with advertisements and other distractions.
“I didn’t want anything that would take me away. I wanted something that would help me stay focused,” said Wong.
He finished building the eBible and started using it for himself and showing it to friends.
“Before you know it, one of my friends said he liked it so much he wanted to fund the project. I was shocked. This was just a simple project for my own usage. I never thought this would be a business,” Wong said to CP.
Wong’s new mission now was to make his eBible available for everyone.
One of his goals for eBible was to make using it an authentic book reading experience.
“For the moment you see your book cover open, to how you flip pages with your fingers, we want to bridge the gap between physical to digital experience,” he said to CP. “This includes being able to highlight individual words, to having sticky notes on the side margin. We want to retain this nostalgic feeling of touching pages, flipping them, yet having all the advantages of a digital experience.”
Highlighting is also made more useful to readers of eBible, because it allows them to highlight words and not just verses in the Bible.
This current eBible app is free and provides a basic Bible with over 40 translations available on it.
Wong and the rest of the team at eBible plan to launch a premium version of it in February 2012.
“The next major version will include a significant social layer built on top of eBible beyond just sharing to FB/Twitter etc,” he said. “This will be our true eBible app. That’s why our motto is “Digital Bible for the Facebook Generation.”
Plans for this app include adding more content such as videos, voice-overs, and audio Bibles.
“There’s a lot of content we can pull in that really enhances the Bible reader’s experience,” Wong added.
However, overloading the app with content is not the intent of eBible, because their focus will continue to be encouraging group reading of the Bible in an electronically interactive world.
