The big reveal for Logos (well, unless you’ve been on the Logos forums for the past six months) is that Logos Bible Software is moving to a subscription.

First, the landing page: Future of Logos

Now, for those who are freaking out about subscriptions, this isn’t what you might think. You’ll still be able to buy stuff for your own library as before. That’s not going away. And you’ll still be able to download a free version of Logos and stay up to date, even without a subscription.

The only real change is that new features (and the datasets that depend on them) are moving over to a subscription model. The primary use case here involves AI-driven features (like the new Smart Search and Summarization features) that have an ongoing cost for server and model access; the subscriptions allow these types of costs to be better covered as the feature is used (instead of once every two years, like has happened for like the past 14 years or so).

Did Rick do anything on this release?

In a word: No. It has been over a year since I worked for Logos, and whatever I worked on then has already been released since it was likely updates for Factbook or reverse-interlinear related.

So for the first time in … forever … I have nothing to report on for this release, and I’m really not sure what work my former team did on this release (though doubtless their fingerprints are all over the underlying data). It’s kinda weird to be watching from the sidelines.

So what has Rick done in the past year? Anything fun?

Funny you should ask. In the role I’ve been in for the past year at BiblioNexus, I’ve recently released the initial version of data that we call ACAI, which is a set of data about people, places, groups, deities, fauna, flora, and realia in the Bible. Releases will continue and it will grow into a knowledgebase about Bible stuff annotated at the word and phrase level of the original languages. It will be localized into several different “languages of wider communication” as support for Bible translators who work in minority languages. It is also openly licensed (CC-BY-SA 4.0) so anyone can use it (heck, even Logos if they wanted to).

Summary

So that’s it. Not much to say as I’m on the outside these days. For those who choose to subscribe, hope y’all enjoy the updates!