The ESV translation of the bible, a relative new comer to the world of bible translations, is taking the Internet by storm. In its short lived life, of about 6 years, the ESV translation has seen wide spread adoption not only in books but also online. The publisher, Crossway Bibles seems to be making a lot of good choices.
The ESV translation is an "essentially literal" translation. It is the second most literal English translation of the bible in wide spread adoption, behind the ASV yet is much easier to read.
Let's take a look at a few of the things Crossway Bibles is doing right with this translation on the Internet.
An API
The very first thing that caught my attention was the API they supply for this bible. They have opened up access to the text for developers to integrate into their sites. This API works very similarly to how Yahoo and Google have their APIs functioning.
Some applications are already taking advantage of this API. For example, there is a wordpress plugin that takes advantage of the API. It can automatically detect passages in the post, create the references, and more.
Audio On The Web
If you go to the ESV bibles website, the Bible Gateway, head over to ebible.com, or grab the text through their API and you have and audio version available at the click of a button. They have made the audio version of the ESV just as accessible as the text version.
This is a big win for those of us who like to listen to the bible while we do other things or for anyone who is an accessibility advocate.
OpenSearch
Want to add ESV search to your browsers search bar? If you are using Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, or any browser supporting OpenSearch you can simply head over to the publishers verse lookup site and add the search. In flock a button will light up next to the search bar. In Firefox click on your search drop down menu and you will see a link to add the search.
Liberal and Smart RSS Use
RSS has become a token of the web these days. Crossway has found some great non-blog ways to use it. They have a verse of the day feed, a read through the bible in a year feed, a daily reading, and much more. The usage of RSS seems to be tied not just to the spread of the bible but to how we tend to read it when we do.
If you can't already tell, I'm a fan of the ESV translation and how Crossway Bibles is handling it on the Internet. They have done a lot of things right that are worth taking note of.
Excellent! We use the ESV
Excellent! We use the ESV through church as well, but I was clueless about these great online features. Thanks for the post and quick overview.
ESV in Drupal
If you are interested in the ESV bible and drupal check out http://drupal.org/node/149898.
e-sword module also available
Though not directly related to the topic of ESV and the Internet, an ESV module is available for the excellent e-sword client bible-study software (Windows only, but works under Wine in Linux).
The only bummer is that it doesn't include the strongs numbers which e-sword uses as the primary key to conduct original language word searches and to perform lexicon lookups. The NASB module for e-sword has strongs numbers but costs money so I have been looking for an alternate for folks at our church (Hope Bible Church) who take hermeneutics classes we offer.
But thanks for posting this MF, it's nice to see an excellent translation offering so many web-friendly ways to get to the text.