Logos Pre-Pub For Part of Migne

Perhaps this has hit the blogs today, but I haven’t checked my feed reader yet, so I don’t know. I got a comment for a fella named Kent on my post entitled "On Migne The Great". He alerts us of a pre-pub for a portion of Migne for Logos. You can see the pre-pub information here. Thanks for the note.

On the one hand, I’m really glad they are doing this. The ability to search all that literature would be great, but I guess you get most (all?) of it from TLG (which is more expensive...and I don’t own that either). Regardless, a great thing.

On the other hand, I don’t use Logos. I did at one time. I own a license for both Bibleworks and Libronix but have chosen the route of BibleWorks, and I really like it. Will this make renew my Logos purchasing as well? We’ll see. But for all of you who do, well, this is a good opportunity for you.

And finally, and I suppose I will post on this more at some point, there are some things that I think should be made available for free use. Some things we should have to pay for. Things that are the basic foundation of building a knowledge of something, like the texts you find in Migne, (in my opinion) should be available for free for all. Books about them? Well, I think people should generally pay for those. Courses about the material? Pay. I think knowledge work is important and people should be paid for it, and well. However, the things which need to be made available for learning to be done, things without which no learning of a time period or people can be done...really, we should all be able to get to those things. And until these things are free and available, we have work to do.

So, do I blame Logos for doing this and charging? No. They are a business, and they have to pay for the massive man-hours that would go into digitizing all of this material. I hold no ill will for them (or anyone else who spends a great deal of time to accomplish something). I might even buy me a copy. I think what they are doing is great. It is the next best thing to having someone doing this and making it available for free. I’m just wishing...and hoping Roger finds his millions to get all of the material digitized and translated.