Coming soon to a certain publishing house, near you, Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions—The Digital Edition. We are not taking orders yet for it. We anticipate that we will have it in stock and ready for purchase in early April.

Last week I spent several hours giving the electronic edition of Concordia a shake-down cruise and— wow—is it nice! The folks at Logos have done a terrific job. Every single cross reference in the book, either to the Confessions or Scripture, is hyperlinked, the search functionality is awesome, and of course, if you add this to whatever existing Libronix system library you have installed on your computer, you can keyword link to your heart’s delight.

Another great feature is that when you search on a word or phrase, or any sort of search at all, by displaying the search results in concordance mode you can easily distinguish between the text proper of the Confessions and the notes, introductions, annotations, etc. throughout the book.

On what computers will it work? All PC systems and any Mac that has an Intel processor with a Windows operating system running. On my Macs, I use Parallels and Windows XP. If you can’t dedicate at least two gigs of memory to VISTA, I strongly discourage using VISTA on a Mac. On the other hand, Windows XP with one gig allocated to it really flies
and the Logos system performs very quickly. In fact, I was talking to
Logos on the phone and we were working on some things together and the
tech on the other end of the phone line was amazed at how fast my
MacBook Pro was booting into Windows and running. She said, "Yea, we’ve
noticed here that all the Macs run Windows a lot faster than the PCs we
have." Smile.

One more comment, apparently there are some people who think that the LOGOS software costs hundreds of dollars. No, in fact every LOGOS enabled product comes as a stand-alone item, which will install the software on your computer you need to search and use the book you’ve bought. So, in this case, you would pay around $29.99 for the electronic edition of Concordia and the LOGOS system is installed on your computer for you to use the Concordia edition.

Here are a few screen of the electronic edition to whet your appetite. Click on the image for a sharper image.

Here are a few more screenshots.

First, here is a shot of search results on the word "Athanasius" showing how, in concordance mode, you can easily distinguish between the appearance of the word in the book’s notes and annotations, and the word as it appears in the text of the Lutheran Confessions themselves.

And here is a screenshot of how it looks when you click through to a specific result in the word search. Notice how the cross references are hyperlinked, and how, yes, all the black and white woodcuts in the book, are in the electronic edition. Due to copyright issues, we were unable to secure the rights to all the color images in the book, so they do not appear in the electronic edition.

If you want to do your daily reading in the Lutheran Confessions on your compute, the hyperlinked reading guide will come in handy. Click on the reference and you are taken to it.