This interview is with our very own, Mark Sears, on the building and launch of eBible.com

What is your web application/service about?

eBible.com is about making the Bible easy to use, understand and share. Making the Bible easy to “use” means things like our advanced Bible search engine which helps people recover verses they kind of remember. And also our tagged bookmarks which help people discover verses by topic. Making the Bible easy to “understand’ is through our library of commentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as the user notes that help provide insight. And lastly, making the Bible easy to “share” means building community around the Bible. You can share through emailing verses to people you know or using our tools for bloggers and webmasters to share the Bible on your own website.

Why did you start this project?

Our team has been doing Bible technology products for over 5 years now and eBible.com is the culmination of all our work in many ways. We created a proprietary ebook device called the Godspeed eBible back in 2001 and then ported our Bible software to Palm OS and Pocket PC devices a few years ago. But we wanted to take everything to the next level and offer our tools to an even bigger platform and audience of the users – the Web.

What technologies are you currently using?

Ruby on Rails, Mysql

What was the development process like?

eBible.com was in development for about 18 months before launch in Sept 2006. The first 4 months was prototyping before finally settling on Ruby on Rails v0.11 as our technology framework. It was a major risk at the time. We had a team of Java developers and even had a bunch of libraries and code already available in Java. Still RoR had too much appeal to pass up so we dove in and committed to the now very popular framework. From the beginning we have used Trac for the software developers and Basecamp for the higher level product planning and communication. For the last 12 months we committed to involving users and have released a new version every 2 or 3 weeks for our beta users to try out. It has definitely been an evolutionary development process with lots of rewriting the back-end and redesigning the user interface. Our team is very talented and dedicated and it has been great to see everyone grow in their skills along the way.

Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?

We have many plans but realize that we need to transition to marathon mode. The first year with beta and everything changing every 2 weeks was fun but we want eBible.com to be around 20 years from now and so we have a longer term view of things now. One of the biggest areas we are working in right now is community. How do we study the Bible together online? To figure this out we are looking at how people study the Bible together offline and how we can integrate the two and affect “Bible study” in the 21st century.

What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Getting the word out about eBible.com. We depend on word-of-mouth and our marketing budget is small.

Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?

We offer premium memberships with access to more reference content and more features. The plan is to continue to evolve and extend this subscription offering over time but we will always have the majority of the site available to everyone for free. Advertising is also something we are working on but it is very important to us to have it be high quality and relevant to our users.

What is the one thing you are most proud of about the project?

The fact that you can type eBible.com into any web browser and use the Bible in a cool and fresh way. Many people have ideas and many have started “Web 2.0 Bible” projects but to sit back and see how far we have come and all the obstacles God has helped us through – wow – He is so faithful and I am just glad to be apart of something like this.