Since Amazon released the Kindle e-reader in 2007, e-books have surged in popularity. But the features that make the technology convenient also hinder its appeal.
Much of the world still has slow or spotty internet service, like the rural Philippines, where American missionary and avid reader Nikki DeMarco Esquivel lives and runs her nonprofit, Mercy House. There, an e-book typically takes more than five hours to download, if it doesn’t fail altogether.
Logistical challenges are also common in Africa, said Philip Hunt, president of Central Africa Baptist University in Zambia. While urban areas may have internet access, many people lack smartphones to connect to it. With more than 60 percent of Zambians making less than $2.15 a day, buying iPads or dedicated e-readers is both difficult and costly. Additionally, many Zambians don’t have bank accounts, making e-payments impossible.
South African pastor Samuel Ndima recalled his seminary days when popular library books were often unavailable, forcing up to six students to share a single book for assignments. He noted that a new, high-quality laptop from brands like Dell or HP can cost around 8,000 rand (roughly $440 USD)—nearly twice the average monthly income in his community, where few can afford broadband internet.
E-books could alleviate these situations, including Ndima’s current need for Bible study material for small groups at his Baptist church in the Western Cape.
Scholar Leaders, an organization that invests in theological leaders across the globe, works to overcome the obstacles that hinder widespread e-book access, especially to Christian publications.
Last year, the ministry launched BiblioTech, an initiative it hopes will allow more Majority World Christians to access publications and journals that would otherwise be too costly or hard to access. The partnership with US Christian publishers such as Baker, Eerdmans, Langham, Fortress, Crossway, WJK, Regnum, and InterVarsity gives seminaries in poorer countries access to commentaries and pastoral training resources via a mobile app.
As it embarked on the project, Scholar Leaders first had to address publishers’ concerns over digital piracy. This often occurs when readers legally buy e-books but then pass them along to others for free. Many of the protections that publishers try to install, such as digital rights management (DRM) software, can be overridden or removed within minutes with instructions that can easily be found online.
“The ease of digital file sharing in Eastern Europe, combined with less established intellectual property norms, leads to widespread unauthorized distribution,” said Polish publisher Aleksander Saško Nezamutdinov. “When one customer shares an e-book, we permanently lose multiple potential sales.”
Alfonso Triviño, CEO of Spain’s largest Protestant publishing house, said he has been dismayed to find full PDF versions of books from Christian publishers circulated widely on digital apps and even loaded into the portals of some churches.
BiblioTech uses advanced encryption technology in its DRM software to curb piracy. That level of protection has increased publishers’ confidence in BiblioTech, said Scott Watson, director of acquisitions at Scholar Leaders’ Theological Book Network.
Programmers also had to create a “lite” tool that would work on lower-end devices in places without reliable internet connections. BiblioTech has an app for Android phones and tablets and Windows and Mac computers. Its iPhone app is still in development.
“If it were easy, someone would have done it already,” said Watson.
BiblioTech incorporates machine translation on the platform for Spanish and Portuguese readers and is working on integrating French. Other languages, including Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Russian, German, and Korean, may be added in the future. To build out these language features, Watson said, designers had to incorporate “user-friendly machine translation into the app” while protecting the translated literature from becoming fodder for large language models, a type of artificial intelligence, which would violate the authors’ intellectual property rights.
Using machine translation—rather than professional human translation—required the BiblioTech team to weigh its commitment to literary excellence in relation to the needs of the Majority World church. Professional human translation provides advantages, especially in the nuanced and specialized contexts of theological literature. But because of the high cost of professional human translation and the need to apply those high costs across each work that is being translated, machine translation will still have a tremendous impact with regard to accessibility for BiblioTech’s partners.
Despite the hurdles, Watson has been encouraged by the positive reactions from publishers and partners in software development.
“It’s obvious that all these friends really do share a fundamental missional commitment: They want to get good Christian literature into the hands of under-resourced pastors worldwide,” he said. “I feel like we’re all in this together … which is how kingdom work should be.”
BiblioTech is being tested with Scholar Leaders’ partner schools in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Philippines, Lebanon, Nigeria, Palestine, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Ukraine, India, Egypt, and Brazil and will be available to additional schools later this year.
The program’s success with supplying e-books to theological education centers gives Esquivel much hope. A large part of her nonprofit focuses on education and illiteracy. She believes that accessing these materials would help students break out of generational poverty—and also encourage her team.
“[My] staff would learn to better understand God’s Word,” she said, “and live it out more effectively in our roles as ministry leaders.”
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