I got invited to take a survey about eBible. The site has added a ton of great social bookmarking and other features. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but you can sign up to be my friend so we can share [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles voice] bible bookmarks!

Here’s what I suggested:

Add NIV and NRSV, the two translations I use the most. I will not use eBible consistently until these translations are available. I’d be willing to pay a few dollars as a license fee if that’s why they’re not available.

Eliminate the automatic highlighting of verses with commentary - it should be possible to turn this off if desired. It’s very distracting. I did notice that it’s possible to turn off highlighting by opening a new translation column, then closing the first one.

Let the text column width be either adjustable or fill the width of the screen - awkward to have forced line breaks, and have the right 60% of my screen empty. By industry standards for typography, either the linespacing (leading) should be decreased, or the column width should be increased slightly. I’d prefer to be able to control this as well as the font face and style, as reading long texts onscreen is difficult, so being able to customize it helps.

I don’t really like the mouseover-scroll buttons. I’d much rather have something I can click and drag. I know a normal textbox scrollbar wouldn’t work because you can scroll all the way from beginning to end of the bible, which is too much for one scrollbar. Maybe something like a jog wheel, which lets you control the speed at which you’re scrolling.

Two suggestions for the additional translation columns:
-Make it possible to view different passages in each column (not just one passage in different translations). This would involve unlocking the scroll feature, so each column scrolled independently (though I’d also want to be able to scroll them all together when reading one text in multiple versions)
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Bookmarking:

• The “create new bookmark” popup should be movable, in case it’s blocking the text and you want to refer to it while creating your bookmark.
• If you select (highlight) a word before right-clicking to add a bookmark, the selected word should automatically be added as a topic
• The ESC key should close the bookmark popup

The social features should be more intuitive. It takes way too much digging into the settings pages to find out that you can add friends with whom you can share bookmarks. There should be a link on every page to this feature. Also, it’s not clear what this sharing will look like, so it’s hard to see the benefit (though I do understand it).

“Use” and “Share”, rather than being on separate pages, should be side by side in columns or panes of some type. It’s too much trouble to switch back and forth between them, yet that’s how you’d use the share feature - when reading the text. And when you see something someone else has shared, you naturally want to read the text. They should go together. Also, it’s unclear that there are all these great social features when you’re on the read screen, which is where most people will look first (since that’s all a paper bible has, you wouldn’t think to look for anything else at first).

Top 3 suggestions:

• Add NIV and NRSV, free or for purchase
• Turn off highlighting of verses with commentary
• Make it possible to “use” and “share” on the same screen (e.g. read text and browse bookmarks/tags)

Great platform! Keep up the good work and improvements.