E-Bible aims for the digital generation

ORLANDO, Fla. — For a generation growing up with digital media, the written word printed on paper has little appeal — even if it's the word of God.

It's for them that an Orlando, Fla., company came up with the multimedia digital Glo Bible.

"You have entire generations of people that don't engage paper very well," said Nelson Saba, founder of Immersion Digital. "If you look at Bible literacy among younger generations, it's dismal. This is designed to be a digital alternative to the paper Bible."

A Gallup poll in 2000 found that about a quarter of young people ages 18-29 read the Bible weekly — about half the rate of those 65 or older. Part of that, Saba contends, is the younger generation's aversion to the printed word.

"There is nothing wrong with paper. I have lots of paper Bibles, but it's just not the media they engage," Saba said.

The Glo, released in October, recently won Bible of the Year award from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. It's the first digital Bible to receive the distinction in the 32 years of the awards.

The company is now working on an application that will allow Glo to go mobile. By the end of the year, Glo software will be available on iPhones and iPads, Nelson said.

"The paper Bible, you have to carry it with you," Saba said. "The biggest advantage of Glo is you can access the Bible through whatever device you have in your hands."

Currently, Glo is available only for personal computers and laptops, but the intent from its inception was that it would be applicable to mobile devices, Saba said.

Saba said he experienced a religious conversion in 1994. Two years later, he left his corporate career as a technology executive for a financial institution to join a company that conceived the Glo's predecessor, the iLumina. The iLumina, released in 2002, has many of the same features as the Glo but was aimed at families as biblical-reference material, serving more as an encyclopedia than an interactive Bible, said Saba, who started Immersion Digital in 2008.

The Glo includes a series of interactive buttons that allow users to explore the Bible through text, a biblical timeline, an atlas and specific topics. Users can select a topic such as "parenting," and the software will produce all scripture referring to parenting. They can click on the atlas button, see an aerial map of Jerusalem, zoom down to a specific spot, such as the Dome of the Rock, and take a virtual tour inside the shrine.