Hard to navigate. No chapter index within books of the Bible.

The best bible I have had. References and commentary outstanding!

iBooks is an amazing tool. Yet this is simply a book with all the notes at the end. There is no way to see comments inline and there is no way to get back from viewing a note. This is unusable in the iBook app and needs to be removed and rewritten. It could be amazing if they would use the new iBook creator and have pop-up notes and videos and all sorts of stuff.

I've been reading the printed version of this Bible every morning for twenty years, so I am thoroughly familiar with its contents. The eBook version contains the same full-length Bible text, plus complete introductions for each Bible book, color maps, and thousands of explanatory notes. What it lacks is an effective method of navigation. The "How to Use this Bible" article in the Table of Contents promises Old Testament and New Testament "hyperlinks" to "quickly access individual Bible books and chapters. "Book links" are supposed to go directly to the Introduction of each book, and "chapter links" are supposed to go directly to the beginning of the chapter. Every book and chapter hyperlink returns (goes back) to the Table of Contents. The "How to" article instructs the user to "consult the device manufacturer's User's Guide for device specific navigation instructions. I purchased, downloaded, and installed this eBook (Apple calls it an iBook) on my new iPad Air. After carefully reading these instructions, I set about to locate the promised hyperlinks. My experience coding hyperlinks in HTML led me to look for hyperlinks throughout the eBook version. Hyperlinks stand out from regular text because they're often underlined and a different color from surrounding text. The default hyperlink color is blue. After several hours over several days, I finally asked for help from a neighbor, who is a veteran Apple user. After looking all over the eBook, he finally noticed a hyperlink in the Table of Contents. The color of the hyperlink was "faded purple". It was so similar to the black text, that I had missed noticing the difference. Once we found a hyperlink, we found all kinds of them throughout the Table of Contents. We quickly bookmarked these hyperlinks to establish a method of jumping to other parts of the Bible. But there is still a problem. Pages in the printed version have the book, chapter, and verse posted at the top of each page (i.e. Leviticus 5:15). The eBook does not have these references, so if you land on a page in any book, all you see is verse numbers. It's like driving a car down the road with no road signs. You know neither whether you are getting near a town (the next chapter) nor how far away from the last town you are (previous chapter). You don't even know for certain what state (book of the Bible) you are in! Until I found the faded purple hyperlinks, I could only use the Table of Contents to find a book. Since I wanted to read Jeremiah 40, I had to tap the page repeatedly to move from the Chapter 1 introduction to Chapter 40. Talk about frustration! My rating of the Bible's content is a solid 5, but my rating for the eBook's pathetic navigation design is 1. That makes my overall rating a 3.

Waste of money. Hard to use, need to page thru everything. Buy the book.