E-Sword: Modern Religious Reference Books

On this page I will be bring you up to date on various e-Sword important items. Note, I am a big TheWord.net (http://www.theword.net) user, and in times past, I was a big e-Sword module creator. I have more than a thousand modules I have made. TheWord is a much feature rich program than e-Sword, and I am converting e-Sword modules into TheWord. I have asked literally dozens and dozens of people to give me permission to put their writings on their websites into TheWord and E-Sword modules, and I have gotten permission from a good number of them. Some of them I apparently are the only people who got that permission. Because of that, I am making some of these theWord modules also in e-Sword for the e-Sword user community out there. Don't be put off if from time to time I push what I understand as the better program, i.e. TheWord. e-Sword's poor programming features have been around for a long time, and for years I wrote Rick about this, and he never wanted to spend the effort to make e-Sword better, more useable. I migrated to TheWord because of that, and I am very happy. I still get a lot of people writing me about e-Sword (for help and such), so I am trying to do what I can.

A feature by feature comparison of the two programs

Okay, so I used e-Sword for a good long while, and I moved on to TheWord. Why? It is because theWord beats e-Sword hands down in everything. The things you can do with TheWord are just beautiful. This sidebar element that I have for you here is so that you can compare what each program has and doesn't have.

If you read these ads I made and examine the images, you wil see for yourself how much better TheWord is than e-Sword. Maybe you will migrate also to TheWord. Maybe you will hassle Rick, E-Sword's creator until he finally stops being so lazy and does improve his program. Maybe he cannot improve his program because he isn't much of a programmer. I don't know, but I have my suspicions on that last one.

Anyway, watch the ads, and see what you are missing!

Card Catalogue - A complete listing of all posts (Modules or Books) on the website. All by Author.

Bookshelves - In my websites, a bookshelf is a single group or grouping of many books (modules or posts). So I have a bookshelf for Bibles, for Greek and Hebrew Books, etc. These are the kinds of things I group under a bookshelf. Bookshelves may have the same books in another bookshelf. A Greek Bible might be under Bibles, and also under Greek-Hebrew works.

Some of these bookshelves can be seen on the second line of the main menu under the banner, for example, Bible Characters. These are books are about Bible characters, with flags for the Bible characters that they deal with.

TIP: Anytime you want to go to the frontpage on www.eswordlibrary.com, just click on the banner, and it will take you there.

Detailed instructions in how to find stuff

Finding a specific book - Well, there is always going to the search box at the top, typing in the search term, and enter. This will probably do in a pinch. But actually there are more and better ways to see what is available. In the top of the sidebar, you will see "Quick Links to this website". Under that, you will find two links after "Card Catalogue:" These links will list all the downloads on my site, first link by book title, and second link by author last name and then title of each particular book. Additionally you will see below this, a link to the "Bookshelves".

Checking out what is new - If you just enter the site without any but the main URL (no slashes after the ".COM") then you will be on the "front page of the website." Here you can scroll down and see all the most recent books in reverse order, i.e. the most recent at the top, and the first books posts at the end. Also you will see a calendar in the top of the sidebar. This calendar is always first set at the current month. You will see a difference in some of the dates on the calendar, and the darker number of the day means that there are posts on that day. You can mouseover these dates and see the posts available for that date, and clicking on it will take you to a rolling list (like I mentioned above) of these posts. I try to spread out the posts so that they are evenly distributed throughout the week (after about 7 posts on a single day, the pop-up times out and closes before reading all of them). Click on the arrow below the calendar will take you backwards or forwards (if you have gone backwards first).

Seeing what has recently been posted - If you scroll down the page and look in the sidebar, you will find a section called "Recent and Upcoming Posts". This sidebar element has 2 things, all recently posted works within the last week or so, and all posts pending to be uploaded and posted in the next few days. If there are none recent, then these elements will be empty.

I don't personally use e-Sword anymore, but there are a lot of people who do use it. Maybe one day they will "wise up" and "step up" to what is better. But none-the-less, I am starting to make modules for e-Sword again. Rick has fractured the e-Sword user base (yet again like the v8/v9) into pre-version 9 and version 9, and there are a lot of other problems.

My website is set up parallel to my TheWord website, twmodules.com, and a lot of what I am working out there, I will implement eventually on eswordlibrary.com. I have been around for a while in this free Bible software scene, and I have seen a lot. I note that most of the websites that have popped up over the years with e-Sword modules have certain problems:

(1) They don't stay around for long.

(2) They don't have unique good content.

(3) They don't have a useful layout of the site.

(4) They don't present you much about the book.

e-Sword users (theWord also) are like little kids with baseball cards, they want to have the most than anybody else, and they want the stars. Unfortunately, most of them don't understand how to use the program effectively for Bible study, even though they can do most things in it. As per their goals, once they "HAVE" a bunch, then they sit around telling their baseball card holding friends how many they have. My purpose for working in this is for personal use. I use my resources to study the Bible for sermons, Sunday School classes, for training my men who preach, and for my own writings (I have written over 200 spanish tracts, and about 70 Spanish books). The things I am looking for are for my own personal ministry.

I want to continue to collect resources that are unique, good, doctrinally sound, and useful for the ministry.

One of my new goals is to utilize the format of e-Sword and make modules specifically for e-Sword and mySword. While there is a great inherent strength in theWord in hyperlinking and setting up tree type hierarchies in a module to truly get a great user experience, e-Sword lacks that. It is more like a Kindle, you just read. You cannot jump around a lot. I will be making modules that focus on that point, gathering similar material from many modules, and dumping it into a single e-Sword module so that the user can go to that module and just read.

David Cox Oct 2, 2014