TechCrunch had the news recently that Google now allows downloads of out-of-copyright books. While Project Gutenberg started down this road, Google is digitizing books at a much larger scale, and their holdings are different in many respects. For example, here’s the table of contents for “A Harmony of the Gospels for Historical Study”, by William Arnold Stevens and Ernest De Witt Burton, published in 1893.

Of course, works in the last 70 or so years are still protected by copyright: if you think only those recent works are worth reading, this won’t matter to you.

Will has put up a nice version of the pericope index for the Composite Gospel that’s dynamically sortable by book. This is something that’s been needed since the beginning: the two fundamental orderings are by pericope sequence (the original), and by individual author (Will’s version). I got bogged down trying to make it work in XSLT and never got it done: thanks to Will for contributing!

I’d put this up on SemanticBible in place of the current one, except that i’m in the process of trying to re-arrange the Composite Gospel presentation altogether. In particular, i’ve been trying to come up with a more visual navigation metaphor, which has proven surprisingly tough: more on this in a later post.