My last post highlighted a new and exciting feature of Google Books - the ability to create your own ‘library’ of google books which are searchable.
I took the time to import a sizeable list of books that I own into my Google Books library. Frankly, I was a little disappointed at how few of my books are available on Google Books. The majority of the books have no preview whatsoever, just the book details! I can’t speak for other disciplines, but it seems that the biblical studies publishers are being a little stingy on the Google Books front!
Now here is why I hope the publishers in biblical studies will start to rethink their position on Google Books: the search has now reached the point that it is going to be very very helpful for people who have already purchased your books. Although my enthusiasm has been squashed a bit, I can only hope that one day I’ll be able to use my Google Books library to do a full text search through my own library, find what I was looking for, and pull the book of my shelf for research. This is such a promising research utility and such a great use of technology. As far as I understand it, it is the publishers that can make this happen.
I sympathize somewhat with publishers on this topic, after all the point is for people to purchase the books, not have free access to them online. But the options in Google Books seem pretty accommodating to me. You can have the whole book indexed, but it can only be viewed in the “snippet” view. This still gives the flexibility of full text searching while not allowing people to read the book online.
So Biblical studies publishers, the ball is in your courts now. Jump on the Google Books bandwagon and you’ll hear the applause of your buyers! Cheers!

UPDATE 1

I apologize for my lack of blogging lately, I’ll try to kick it up a notch soon. I have two book blurbs in the pipeline as well as a few other ideas stirring.

I have been busy teaching my first official class as a prof. It is tons of fun teaching Greek so far, and my students are responding positively to my use of technology in the class. What all do I do, you may ask? Well:

• First and foremost, my university is in the processing of switching their LMS to moodle, and a number of us are testing it out this year. It is fantastic. So I do exercise checkups online, as well as distribute class materials (btw, I’m using Gerald Stevens, New Testament Greek Primer Cascade Books. It is great!)
• I deliver all lessons in Keynote (Mac’s presenter software). I also use Omnidazzle to scribble on the screen when doing parsing and translation. Then once I’m done I upload it as a PDF for them to have.
• I wrote some absolutely terrible songs that nontheless have helped them learn their paradigms. I had to swallow my pride for this part. p.s. Don’t ask, I’m not giving them out
• I started creating lesson recaps. Utilizing Mac’s Keynote recording feature, I basically sit in my office and go through the presentation again, albeit quicker, and speak over the presentation. Then I export it to quicktime and upload it to moodle.
• I encourage the students to use Ken Penner’s Flash!Pro software for vocabulary memorization
• I also read the chapter vocabulary and place them online as mp3’s to help the auditory learners with vocab

I have worked hard this month to get my lessons all prepared because, as some of you know, I’m now officially a p/t PhD student with none other than our biblioblogging Birdman himself, Mike Bird. My Dissertation is on David and davidic typology in the gospel of Matthew. Fun times!

UPDATE 2:
There have been a few new blogs that have come to light in the past few weeks. Some have just started, some I just learned about. These are the four latest to be added to the Deinde Biblioblog search: Sermon to the Hebrews, Notes on 1 Peter, agaphseis, and Confessions of a Bible Junkie.

There was also a big new website announcement, in my mind anyway. Bulletin of Biblical Research (BBR) now has an upgraded website, including free PDF or .doc downloads of the articles. As a proponent of open source scholarship, I did a backflip (figuratively) when I heard about this. A great journal that is now open to the whole world — well, up to 2004 anyway, but a 3 year buffer is not bad at all.
Anyway I say all of that to let you know that BBR, both citations and the full text, are now indexed in the Deinde Journal Search. One other significant addition I have made to this search is the new JETS archive at the Reclaiming the Mind website.

And as to final Deinde search, the web search, I have updated it so that it now searches every site or page that is connected to the NTGateway as well as iTanakh.

That’s all! Cheers!

Some of you may recall that Deinde had a glossary for biblical studies on our old platforms. I’ve now updated the glossary using a great little tooltip wordpress plugin (h/t to Chris Roberts). So the Deinde glossary is now back and better than ever — Just hover over the word to see the definition! As far as I know, the Deinde glossary is the largest glossary for biblical studies on the net (335 terms and counting). If there are any terms we are missing, or if you think my brief definition is a little off, please let me know! Help us make it even better. I hope you enjoy it.

Deinde Biblical Studies Glossary

Hey there Deinde readers! Thanks for coming back. We have been down for a number of weeks and have migrated to Wordpress. We’re now back with a bit of a new look and a comments option that won’t stump James Crossley and Jim West

We are still doing some work behind the scenes with some other aspects of deinde which we are excited to let loose soon.

In the meantime we have another exciting announcement beyond just being back in business. Jason Hood has joined the Deinde blogging team! We’re very happy to have him on board, and look forward to his thoughts.

Deinde’s new feed is http://www.deinde.org/?feed=rss2