• Why do we need another yet another bible study program? and
• What is the purpose of the NETBible™ learning enviroment?

• How can you help?
• What can you get “for free” from NETBIBLE™

Problem(s):  A problem exists today in that the latest biblical scholarship is not available for free or at an affordable cost to the majority of Christians worldwide. This is similar to the situation 12 years ago when bible.org started putting Bible studies on the web and found that they soon exceeded the number of verses that they could quote from modern bible translations and they could not buy the rights to freely use a modern translation. The solution was to launch the NETBible® (NET) project, a modern translation derived from the best currently available Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts and make the NET freely available on the Internet. In addition the ministry adapted a Ministry First approach to the bible.org website for its the 3000+ articles. While not claiming to be the major cause of the of making modern bibles available on the Internet for free we are all aware that these modern translations are now available on line where in 1995 there were none.

Where are we in 2007? As in 1995 most of the latest biblical scholarship is not available for free as it is often restricted behind copyrights and expensive software licenses. One has to wait on the order of 70 years before a work passes into the public domain and is available for free. This fact is one of the main reasons that large amounts of material remains locked up in very expensive Bible study programs. One question bible.org has asked its community, What can we do to encourage authors and publishers to make or move copyrighted material into the market place for free or with minimal and reasonable costs? Can we change the marketplace dynamics? Many have said yes, therefore, Bible.org has launched this NETBIBLE™ project in attempt to stimulate that change and secondarily to a better job at "finding and organizing material" for users and the community of Christian websites serving the worldwide Internet community.

The NETBIBLE™ team believes that one the main problems is that authors sign away their electronic rights to big publishers in order to get their books published and those publishers are not motivated as a group to release electronic versions as they believe that it will adversely effect sales. Most even withhold the electronic rights to an authors work, when they no longer publish the book. We, by acting together, can change this marketplace reality and develop an alternate market whereby authors can sell their book rights separate from their electronic rights. In fact if we could grow this market quickly it would have the power to approach a publisher and encourage them to offer the electronic rights to the NETBIBLE™ community while also offering the book to this NETBIBLE™ e-store channel at its normal book reseller discounts. It is likely that the publisher would sell even more books and the NETBIBLE™ project would generate to pay authors directly for their material.

Purpose of the NETBIBLE™: Develop the next generation Bible Study Toolset and a development community that can harness and organize biblical material for the user as well as create a marketplace that can attract authors and publishers to make available newer material at reasonable cost or free. This material may be from: your personal library, cooperative Christian websites or the Internet in general

Vision: Make available to millions of users worldwide excellent biblical content and the latest scholarship organized with the latest tools.

Proposal: Begin a community driven NETBible project that has the Purpose/Vision above and is able to become the principal Bible study toolset for millions of users so that it can literally become a force in the marketplace.

Plan: Begin to execute the proposal and invite community involvement

Phase 1 2006- Bible.org to begin the NETBible study framework and put it on the web to validate that it can begin to accomplish the purpose statement above
Results to date: Users have responded in an overwhelming manner. The Beta Software affirms that the approach can meet the functional purpose statement and we have begun to build a user base as traffic is consistently over a million hits a month

Phase 2 (2007)-Expand the project By:
1- Invite organizations, and individuals to join the NETBible project team to help plan and finance further development of this next generation Bible Study Toolset and the acquisition of quality & modern content
2-. Status: To further the purpose and vision of the NETBible Team. Bible.org has made available for download the NETBible and the content on its site consistent with its www.bible.org/copyright statement
3-. To help build finances for the NETBible project bible.org has set up a special fund for donations designated for NETBible and it has allocated a portion of all the monies spent at the www.bible.org/store that originate from a NETBible page