TNIV audio and Study Bible, not well promoted
In his comment on Should we abandon our Bible?, Rick Mansfield laments that Zondervan and IBS are not promoting TNIV more strongly, and in my comment there today I agree with him. But in fact there does seem to be some activity on the TNIV front. For example, the TNIV Bible Blog has recently had its first post for nearly a year, announcing TNIV Bible Audio Now Online. I hope this and the new TNIV Study Bible are signs that TNIV is being promoted strongly.
But if so, zero marks for how it is being promoted. On the main TNIV info site I can't find anything about the TNIV Study Bible, nor about the online audio Bible. And when I go to Zondervan's site to try to find the former, I am met with a message:
But if so, zero marks for how it is being promoted. On the main TNIV info site I can't find anything about the TNIV Study Bible, nor about the online audio Bible. And when I go to Zondervan's site to try to find the former, I am met with a message:
This website is designed to be best viewed with Windows Internet Explorer 6.0. Full support for other major browsers is planned for future editions.And indeed the search facility does not work at all with my Firefox browser. I'm sorry, Zondervan, but I am not going to downgrade my web browsing to use a five year old browser which has now been replaced in order to buy your products, not am I going to wait for "future editions", I am going to go elsewhere and so are many of your other customers.
posted by Peter Kirk at 11:29 AM
5 Comments:
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To Zondervan's credit, the "Inspired by...The Bible Experience" TNIV audio BIble has been getting a lot of attention in the press and is front and center on Zondervan's site.
I've also been told that Zondervan is currently working on a completely revamped TNIV.com (the current site "feels" neglected) which hopefully will be up any day.
I noticed that Zondervan has a new banner at the top of their main website, so that may be a first sign of some changes as well.
But the inability to search the Zondervan site with anything but IE6 is a tremendous problem. Usually if I'm looking for a product, I search by Google and look for the Zondervan hits or--worst case scenario--fire up XP in Parallels Desktop for Mac.
Here's another problem. Zondervan should write the TNIV Bible Blog, not IBS.
Take for example Crossway's ESV blog. This really sets the stage for a blog devoted to a translation should be like. Why? Because there's more to the translation than the text itself. There're also the products that incorporate the translation.
Looking over the last handful of entries on the TNIV blog, what's promoted? A free audio version from a website, profile of translators, positive endorsements, etc. Now all that's fine and good, but where's the post on the TNIV Study Bible? Where a post about the Bible Experience? These kinds of posts will be hard coming to the TNIV Bible blog because they're Zondervan products. The problem is that these products are the ones front and center. The average person is going to buy a TNIV Bible with Zondervan on the cover, rather than ordering direct from IBS (although that's how I got my initial copy--I like supporting them).
That's part of the problem, the wrong folks are writing the blog.
I now realise that I was a little confused about the TNIV websites. tniv.info is maintained by IBS and as such relates only to the basic TNIV text, not to specific products using it. Zondervan's TNIV site is tniv.com, and this is the place to go for specific TNIV products like the TNIV Experience and the TNIV Study Bible. And this site appears to work OK with Firefox. The only problem is that many of the Zondervan products are not available in the UK and Europe - although they can be obtained by international mail order, I have heard that the cheapest way is from Australia.
But then if I am confused by these multiple websites, then how much more confusion is there likely to be for the ordinary purchaser!
The TNIV Study Bible is in fact available from amazon.co.uk. I'm not sure what the rules are which allow them to sell this.
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