The iPad Mini has lower resolution than the Clarion, but higher opacity. It’s slimmer, too.  ….

The convenience of Bible apps is a good thing.

Thanks to smartphone Bible apps, people have access to the text at times and in places they ordinarily wouldn’t. Most of us don’t carry printed Bibles everywhere we go. I can’t count the number of times prior to the advent of smartphones that I wanted to check a quotation, look up a cross reference, or simply read but couldn’t thanks to the fact that I didn’t have a physical copy of the Bible near to hand. Those days are pretty much over. Because the technology is still relatively new, people who don’t ordinarily take an interest in the Bible seem to get excited about it …

But e-readers are not an unqualified good.

My hope for e-books is not that they’ll go away, but that in the future they will get better, eventually surpassing physical books. They have a long way to go, however….

The downside I see with the use of Bible apps is not the software itself, but the larger context of the media consumption device — not the e-books, in other words, but the e-readers. When sermons bored me as a kid, I found myself flipping through the color maps in the back of the Bible. If you bore me while I’m holding my iPad, I have more sophisticated means of distraction at my fingertips.

I use the ESV Study Bible app in church from time to time, mainly because I appreciate the notes but don’t have a special load-bearing harness required for carrying the printed edition. (I exaggerate, but the thing is heavy.) While I’m not one of those people who forgets to switch his phone to silent mode –– my phone lives in silent mode –– I can’t seem to open it without a flood of notifications spilling across the screen. I’ll admit I’ve found myself glancing at incoming e-mails when I was supposed to be following along with a reading.

We give ourselves far too much credit when it comes to multi-tasking. The people in my life who rely uncritically on screens tend to be the most scattered and disengaged, the most shallow. (Sometimes I’m one of them.) This is not because such outcomes are inevitable with the switch to screens. It’s just that they’re harder to avoid, requiring more discipline. Still, some context is helpful. I’ve done a lot of Bible reading in church that had nothing to do with the sermon simply because I was more interested in the text than I was in the sermon….

There’s a larger question: screens in worship. And e-readers aren’t the worst offender.

Our anxiety about small screens in worship seems belated, mainly because the battle seems to have been fought and lost some time ago. For many evangelicals, at least, the idea of worshipping without screens is rather scandalous. Hymnals are remembered as something akin to a medieval torture device. Ditching them in favor of the then-new projection screen is supposed to have liberated worship. Instead of looking down, we could look up. Instead of each worshipper absorbed in a private world, ours eyes could be fixed on the same object.

To be frank, if I could give every pastor in the world an iPad in exchange for pulling down the projection screens, I would do it in a heartbeat. My tolerance for misspelled, unpunctuated lyrics projected onto sentimental backdrops ran out long ago. The conversion of our churches into something resembling a mid-tier sports bar is more than a subtle shift, and the messages it sends are not subtle, either. For every instance of the technology being used well, there must be a thousand examples of it used poorly. In my mind the experiment has failed, only most of us are too deep in to back out now.

Perhaps that knowledge is what makes some of us want to push back against the enthusiasm of early adopters. Once a medium is embraced uncritically and goes mainstream, people come to expect its use. So what if it’s used badly –– that badness has become the new norm. Some people prefer it, just as they prefer other inferior experiences to which they’ve grown accustomed.

To the extent that the rise of the new screens prompts us to go back and examine the question of screens as a whole, I welcome the scrutiny. It seems to me that Bible apps in worship have a lot of potential, but if we adopt them in the same spirit with which we have adopted projection screens, the results will be similar: a flawed norm whose ubiquity tends to mitigate against necessary course corrections. …

Paper as a technology should not be sold short.

One footnote is in order, since this is a site dedicated to the physical form of the Bible. Don’t sell paper short too quickly, as if its the technology equivalent of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World War. While I’m a lover of obsolete technology, my thing for print isn’t an expression of that fondness.

Before there was a digital revolution, there was a desktop printing revolution which made print a more viable and flexible technology than ever, putting the tools of the book into the hands of the people of the Book like never before….. Paper is still the best technology for a lot of applications, and there’s no reason why churches can’t be places where print is done well…My point is, people who feel defensive about printing often do so out of an anxiety that printed books can’t defend themselves. Like the arts, they need some kind of subsidy to survive. I’m not sure that’s the case. All print needs, really, is for people who’ve overcome their uncritical love of screens to recognize that, for all their potential, screens aren’t the solution to every problem. Sometimes paper is better technology. The ideal future would be one in which we use the print where print works best and e-books and apps where they work best without letting the means of delivery or transmission loom larger than the message itself.

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Read more at http://www.bibledesignblog.com/2013/08/ipads-in-the-pulpit.html