Should I have only an Electronic Libray, or do I need a hard copy of certain items also?

I think that I’m beginning to get over being a cheapskate, though the battle is tough, but as long as I can give my tithe and gifts to the Lord, and still buy cool stuff like a whole electronic collection of over 24 volumes of John Piper books, I figure it must have been in His plans. That’s perfect logic if you ask me, but anyways, I had mentioned the question previously on why you want to have both a hard copy of a book and an electronic copy. Well having the electronic copy is really easy to demonstrate if you have a wonderful Bible Software program like my Libronix Digital Library System. Notice below I have open in that program both the book, and a search on that book looking for the word “faith”.

So instead of trying to find faith by hoping that it’s marked in the back of the book in the index, I simply click on a search and in 2 seconds it returns me 213 places that the word faith is found in this Piper book.

As I clicked on the first occurrence “The Call to Fight for This”, which had 8 occurrences on page 36, the program went to that place in the book on the left and highlighted the results.

Now if I want to really expand my search on “faith” in what Piper writes, I can define all of his works as a collection, and then search on that collection, really cool!

And bingo, in about 8 seconds, it brought back 4,183 hits on faith in the whole John Piper collection of books.

The key word here is “time” and using time efficiently… I couldn’t even guess at the amount of time that it would take had I to look up faith manually in each book. This is just a tiny example of the power of this software, and the ease of putting together a study, much less an aide in preparing a sermon.

I’ve had this software program for over 15 or more years now (which is a guess, it might be more like 20), actually bought my first copy at one of those software stores that use to be around everywhere, but have now flown the coop. Well it ran much different on first my 386, and then 486 computer models, then to my current Dell that screams with speed, and with storage capacity. Not only has the computer changed, but my Logos is now my Libronix, and as I am growing in the Lord, this program keeps changing too, to keep up with my study needs, and to make those needs easier and more varied in depth.

The reason that I purchased the hard copy of Carson’s “The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God” was because I’m reading it with about 6 other men, and take it to the 1 hour sessions we have to discuss what we have read. While I could simply print out a portion, such as a chapter or two, it is also good at times to have a hard copy to be your companion in your easy chair, as you meditate on your reading and what God is communicating to you through that reading.

If you have an opinion on the matter, let me know, comments are always welcome! I liked doing this so much that I'll probably show more posibilities with the digital library, and hope to get the graphics improved too.