• The book itself in terms of content is very good. But, the Logos edition of this book leaves much to be desired. Contrary to what it shows in the sample pages, there is no red color coding in the Logos edition. The sample pages are not at all accurate in this regard. Also, the layout of the Logos edition compared to the print edition isn't the greatest. In some places the English information doesn't line up well with the Hebrew in the tables. Also, the vowel markings in some suffixes (e.g. pronominal suffixes) aren't displayed clearly. Vowel markings run together and/or it's not always clear what consonant the vowel is supposed to be aligned with. (The use of circle as a stand-in for a consonant letter with the vowel in question properly aligned under it would have taken care of this issue.) I recommend getting the printed edition rather than the Logos one. The downside of that one, however, is that it's bulky. I'm glad I can use the Logos edition when traveling.
    1. I agree, the lack of red highlighting and the lack of using non-breaking spaces as place holders for consonants bugged me too, however having Full text search in Logos was excellent, combined with the Keyman keyboard for Windows I was flying around the textbook searching in Hebrew in no time!
    2. thanks for the tip about the Keyman keyboard. It is useful. Just found another gripe with the Logos edition of this book though: typos. Check this out "The numbers one hundred (מֵאָה) and one thousand (לֶ֫לֶף) should be memorized." Gary D. Pratico and Miles V. Van Pelt, Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar, Third Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), 110. The number for 'one thousand' is אֶ֫לֶף . The printed edition doesn't have this typo. I wonder how this kind of thing happens. Did Logos not get electronic text directly from Zondervan? (Interestingly, the Logos edition of the second edition of Learning Biblical Hebrew doesn't have this error.) I have found other errors as well. Aside from the advantage of searching the text quickly and portability, the Logos edition leaves much to be desired.
  • Content-wise, this is a great book. It's well researched, clearly written, and thought-provoking. One of the great strengths of this book is that it features lots of quotes of original sources. For example, David Ben-Gurion in a letter to his son in 1937 stated: "We must expel Arabs and take their places… and, if we have to use force – not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places – then we have force at our disposal." That is a powerful statement. If you want to know the Zionist position, then it is important to hear from the Zionists themselves. But, the book's strength is compromised a bit by how the book is formatted for the Logos app. This e-book does not use indentation to mark off the quoted material. This makes it frustrating to identify where the quote begins and ends. The person who made the statement is bolded, but the reader is given very little indication as to whether it is the paragraph preceding the person's name or the paragraph following that is the quoted material. I found myself often scrolling up and down the screen to make sure I knew who said what. On the plus side of the format are the very useful hyperlinks that characterize all of the Logos resources. Colin Chapman and Kate Benson, Whose Promised Land: The Continuing Conflict over Israel and Palestine (Oxford, England: Lion Books, 2015).
    1. I agree - I found the content of the book greatly helped my thinking on the issue, but the lack of formatting in this ebook makes it difficult to read, with block quotes not being formatted as you would expect them to be, and no spacing beneath them. It really needs to be a Reader Edition.
  • This is a bare-bones edition of the New City Catechism: the question, the answer, and the Scripture text, and little else. The commentary, that is part of the NCC app, is absent. I wanted all that the app offers, but with the excellent tagging and search features that are the hallmarks of Logos resources. Well, there's not much to tag in this resource. The Scripture text relating to the question is already available in the catechism. Power Lookup isn't going to do much for you there. Personally, I find the NCC app to be much better.
  • Please keep in mind that the Logos 8 engine upgrade will be freely available sometime in early 2019. That means that the features and data-sets you have in Logos 7 will transfer over. However, the additional features of the Logos 8 Starter which aren't part of Logos 7 Starter package...will cost you. Fair enough. New features cost money to develop, and these need to be paid for and the company needs to make a modest profit. My biggest gripe with Logos' approach, however, is in what I see as questionable marketing. When you look over the features of Logos 8 Starter you see prices for "Value if sold separately". For example Logos Bible Maps Volume 2 lists as $14.95. If you did a product search for the same on this site, you would also see the $14.95 price tag. This is imaginary. The fact is that these items aren't sold separately. These price values only serve to increase the dollar amount of the "Total Value if sold separately" figure so that customers can feel like they are getting quite a bargain. That's a marketing gimmick. To my way of thinking, if you don't sell the item separately, then don't advertise it with a price tag as if you do. Logos resources are very good, and can stand on their own merit. Faithlife doesn't need to use these kinds of tactics to sell their excellent products, in my opinion. I'm still trying to decide if the additional features in the Logos 8 Starter are worth it. The Workflows look really good. If I could buy just the ones I needed at the list price for items "if sold separately", that would run my about $60. I would gladly pay that. Instead I have to pay a great deal more than that, and get a lot of things I don't have any use for. It's hard to decide if it's really worth it.
    1. It's really unfortunate that Faithlife doesn't give us the option of buying just the features we need. As Michael pointed out, these packages contain lots of public domain material that's freely available elsewhere. If you find a pdf file of one of the Christian classics, you can easily get it converted for the Kindle. The other problem with all this "stuff" in Logos is that it takes up room. My on-the-go laptop only has a small 128 gig SSD. I don't want to fill it up with stuff I don't need. Something else to keep in mind about "upgrading" to Logos 8, is that Logos 8 still does not have all the features of Logos 7! We really don't the specifics of which features. Logos Support simply says "There are also a handful of features that didn’t make it into 8.0 that we plan to bring back in the near future." What's a handful? Which features? Who knows? (See: https://support.logos.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019175372-Changes-from-Logos-7-to-Logos-8#h.48vx2blewykp).  I'm very leery of "upgrading" unless I know for sure that it is indeed an upgrade.
    2. I think of "value if sold separately" as what it would cost to purchase physical copies of the books. This is the way it was before the internet, all your books were on shelves in your library. A large library was a very large investment (and very impressive to see) which was generally built over many years. When Logos became available as an online tool, the comparison of books you could "own" multiplied many times and at a cost many times lower than purchasing all of the books physically . I think it's a fair assessment to say that a library has a certain value if the books were all bought separately, as in this manner. However, as books online and in-the-cloud become the norm, and as the generation that purchased physical libraries passes, less and less people will understand the comparison. While I believe there is more value in having a book in my hand rather than in the cloud, the digital world is definitely more practical and it is our current world. The same is true with music - many people value LP's and CD's with artwork, lyrics, and liner notes over music in the cloud, yet we still pay the same price for an "album", and many people even opt for an online music subscription service to access a huge library of songs without even "owning" them. I like that with Logos, I actually do own the books, and I prefer paying for software upgrades rather than pay for a subscription to use the software like Adobe did! Thank you Logos!
    3. , "value if sold separately" isn't just for books. It's used for features as well, but you can't buy these features "separately". That's a marketing gimmick that I personally have problems with. If Microsoft, for example, gives a price for MS Word when purchased separately from the Office suite, the customer really can purchase Word separately. Likewise with music, I can buy the whole album or I can choose individual songs to download. They put a price on an individual item vs. the whole package, and you can buy individual items. That's legit. With many features in Logos, you can't do that (e.g. Workflows in Logos 8). So, why put a price on something that not's really for sale? I would much prefer a simple "Not applicable" for those features and leave the price tags on the books, which can actually be bought separately. Better yet, would be to really sell those features separately as well so that the customer has more options.