Nelson Saba Creates a Bible for Busters

Before his conversion, Nelson Saba, a 50-year-old Brazilian evangelical Christian was a technology vice president at Citibank. He's in love with technology and all the cool things it can do. In 2007, he left his job and followed a call to create a Bible for the digital generation. What he created with Phil Chen, a Taiwanese businessman, literally brings the pages of the Bible to life.

In addition to all the chapters and verses of the canon, GLO has Bible commentary and a Bible dictionary, as well as 2,300 photos, 700 paintings of Biblical scenes by well-known painters (Michelangelo, Chagall), 500 virtual tours of the Holy Land, and a timeline that runs through "creation" through the first century. It can be sorted chronologically, geographically, or thematically, and all of its moving parts are cross-referenced
 
Saba and Chen worked with Zondervan and 25 full-time people to translate Saba's original vision into reality. This summer I got to preview GLO (which is amazing!) and talk with Nelson about his inspiration and his passion to reach the digital generation.

Boomer-Friendly     Through Other Lenses
Real-world design     The Bible on the Leading Edge of Technology

What was your initial inspiration?

Nelson:    It really came out of the fact that, across society, we are visual people. Most of what we consume in terms of media is through visual communication. Add to that fact that now, we have two entire generations that were born into a digital world, and that changed very much how they consume and use media.

But we have done very little in terms of taking the Bible to that digital interactive media world in which they live. It's really not about just putting the Bible in the digital format, but it's about thinking what would the Bible be in that interactive media world?

So it's similar to what Eugene Peterson did recently with The Message.

Nelson:    And it's not too different from what happened throughout history. The King James version of the Bible was done to make a popular translation of the Bible so everyone could read it. Some people are still holding onto that, and sometimes I think we resist change too much. The price we pay is that we end up losing generations that do not connect with what we connect with.

So what we are attempting with this is to make this a product that will be effectively a Bible for this digital generation, the "Busters." But it's also designed to be "Boomer-friendly." In other words, the Boomers will embrace it.

We have a boxed product that is geared toward Boomers, and also a free download for Busters that takes an iTunes approach: you can buy what you want and build it as you go. We'll also have this eventually run not only on your laptop, but your Smartphones and on the web as well.

We live in a world where everybody has and uses multiple devices every day. So we want to make it available to everyone through all the tools they use. And you want to see your notes, your favorites, so it will synchronize across these devices. And it will give you the feeling of having your own personal Bible with you all the time.

We have reading plans, for instance, that are very flexible. If you're interested in a subject, you can pull up all the passages that talk about that and make it your reading plan. You do that at home in the morning then go to the office. At your office you have a break and want to do some reading, so you turn on your Smartphone. You'll be able to continue where you left off. There are many many details that together make this a product that will connect with many generations and will fit with the way they like to consume media these days.

One of the other things we talk about with this product is that we want it to be the best way for you to find what you need in the Bible. We did a number of focus groups, and people shared how they believe the Bible has all the answers to the challenges they're facing in life. This is true even for very nominal Christians who aren't really in the faith. They have reverence for the Bible and believe it has answers, but they don't know how to find it. That's because paper isn't very conducive to that.

Even when you go to the electronic Bibles that are available online today, you still have trouble searching. For example, if you search for the word depression, you're likely to find a verse in Leviticus that talks about how to heal a depression in a wall. Now we need to look for passages on depression and frustration because you're frustrated.

That's because most tools that are created for Bible study are created more for the serious Bible student or seminary scholar, the pastor, not so much the average Christian, or even less the digital generation.

So you're really also addressing a language barrier.

Nelson:    The linkage needs to be topical and not based on words. So the screen (which looks like a view of outer space) is full of white dots and each dot represents content. One is a photo, one is an article, another is a Bible passage. These are each lenses that allow you to see and browse this world of content according to those lenses.

So one lens is geographic. If you go over a geographical lens, you'll see what's available. The geographic is organized by how it relates to the geography of the Holy Land. And it operates like Google Maps, so you're able to dive in and find everything about the location. So you can look for content in the Bible based on location.

You can look at Jerusalem and see the Dome, the areas of the city. Wherever there is a label with a rectangle, you'll see everything that relates to that label; articles, passages, photos, etc. There's lots of immersive imagery that relates to that location and allows you to learn about different locations and their meaning.

What we were finding was that we were looking for content based on the geography of how it relates to the Holy Land. But you have other lenses as well.

The topical lens organizes based on topics. Here we deal with not only the Biblical world and places, but with topics that relate to everyday life. For instance, if you click on "life" as a topic, you see that you have options like your personal life, your life with God, your life with other people.

If you're about to get married and you want to learn everything about marriage, you can see it gathered in this place. It relates to marriage but may not necessarily use the word "marriage." If you're interested in reading that, you can make it your reading plan. You can even specify how many minutes a day you want to read and it will plan that for you.

Let's say that you want to read those passages now, it organizes the books of the Bible and pulls them together by how they relate to the word "marriage." Only the applicable verse is highlighted, but if you want to read the entire passage, you can click on it and read it as well.

That's a huge amount of work to pull together topical searches like that, as well as compiling all the articles, photos, videos, etc. Is that new content you created yourselves?

Nelson:    Most of the content is licensed from publishers. We worked primarily with Zondervan during development. Let's say you go to Matthew 27, and want to read there. The screen is designed to look like a paper Bible and be very readable. You can make the font or the page bigger, you can change other things to customize it for yourself. It's a red-letter edition, and verses that have notes are highlighted so you can read them. We also hid the controls so you don't see them unless you mouse over them. The idea is to make it more like a real-world object. Any time you have lots of things (photos, artwork, virtual tours, etc.) that relate to the passage, you can explore them if you want because they're linked together.

If you want to see all the resources at once, you can see them. It's geared very heavily toward a complete experience. Since this is a world that existed thousands of years ago, it's very hard to imagine, so this helps you picture things as they were and shows you photos of the ruins of the places. Each chapter has a world of content that helps you experience a little bit what it's like.

We're not trying to create a simple E-book. I believe the power of digital media goes far beyond that. That's just the beginning. We added many many layers of functionality that are not even possible with paper, but are possible with technology.

So you'll continue to develop new applications for the Bible?

Nelson:    You could make short segments of films and illustrate passages to be synced with the content. Then we could link that to a store to buy a full-length film that goes with the passage.

So is your background in engineering?

Nelson:    I do have a graduate degree in computer engineering. My undergraduate degree is aeronautical engineering. I used to work in the financial world, but then I really felt the call to do this kind of work. I left everything I was doing in the financial world to focus on this.  

I started the design around May of 2007. We went into a lot of discussions and then started development in January of 2008. Then in July of 2009 we were ready for replication of the product, and it releases in October.

The materials come in a wallet which opens and has three DVDs you install in your computer. You get activation keys for your computer and your Smartphone. We'll have Windows Mobile and PC day 1. Within six months to a year we'll be on Macs and iPhones. You get those as activation licenses so you can install them on your devices without any more money.

Where did the visual and design concepts come from? They're very unique.

Nelson:    To a large extent, that's my contribution. Not the graphical design, necessarily, but the functionality and the concept of what we implemented, is what we did from May 2007 through December 2008. We looked at trends and developments in software technology, as well as trends in how this digital generation uses technology.

There's a lot of trending toward "natural user interface." It means you create software that behaves like real-world objects. So you use your knowledge of real-world objects to do something. One example is how we do the Bible. We put the entire Bible in front of you and tell you to use it. It's not that hard to figure out because it leverages on your knowledge of how objects work in the real world.

We do have user manuals and how-to videos for things that you won't figure out intuitively, but we minimize that. Most of it is intuitive because you model your software after the real world.

Another thing you'll see is this whole notion of using zoomable interfaces. Once you learn how to use one of those lenses, you'll see that whatever you learn becomes very intuitive for all other lenses. If you learn how to dive into the topics, geography, and Bible, when you come to the timeline, you'll understand how to dive into that.  You may quickly find what you want once you have an idea how the search works.

In the final product, you'll even be able to get articles that are on the web because we'll be aggregating content. The zoomable spaces are great because they work so well for bringing together so much content. It's like using Google Maps. You start out with a space-level view of the world. You know which country you want to look at, so you zoom to the country. Then you see the state and city, and quickly you're down to the street level. In a world of millions of streets, you got there very quickly, and we applied that process to the Bible and make it very easy to find things very quickly.

We also allow you to use the lenses in combination. Let's say you were reading in Revelation about the four churches. So you use the Bible lens to read the verses, but you want to see the geographical reference. So you use the geography lens to look at where they're located, and visually you can do very complex selections of material. It's a very effective way to read and search the Bible.

If you think about Scripture, it was originally shared by word of mouth. Sinai is where you find the most ancient Hebrew writings, and back then, it was high tech. It was used as new media for the Bible and became a written form. The Roman codex was invented for the Bible, so it was on the leading edge of new media. The Gutenberg press was invented for printing Bibles. So always we're moving into new media, which has lots of possibilities that the previous media did not have. If you explore all those, you might get to something quite powerful.

I believe the power of media is that it allows you to have an experience, not just read an analyze. When you have an experience, you learn something in an active way that allows you to assimilate much more information than when you intellectually read something.

And I believe that this reflects how this new generation likes to consume content. They like to experience and they like things that are relevant for them. I think here you find lots of relevance.

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