Building a Logos Bible Software collection

 

Logos is a great bible study tool.  One of its strengths is the access to thousands of books about all aspects of Christianity.

Once you have a set of resources you can use the program to search and research any topic.  The bigger your collection the richer the results because you get relevant material written from different points of view.

Only trouble is, it gives you too much choice, which means trying to figure out how to get started on building a collection is complicated.

Logos offers bundles to help make sense of it.

The bundles can contain a lot of material that you might not ever use. I would think carefully about what kinds of studies you intend to do. 

I expect that the needs of a lay leader, a teaching pastor, a home group leader, or a layperson doing self-study are dramatically different. And even within these roles, your points of interest will vary greatly too. For example, you may be interested in exploring Messianic Christianity or you are interested in Original Language study. I'm just an abnormally bookish layperson. I started with a bundle but found that much of it I never used. 

If I was starting over, I would think carefully about what my role and interests are and go from there. 

For lay people, I would suggest getting a base collection comprising:

• a couple of good bible dictionaries (which in Logos world means encyclopedias, I have Tyndale and Harpers), 
• a study bible (which in Logos world means the notes that comes with a study bible, not the bible text itself e.g. ESV study bible is like that, and you still have to buy the ESV separately) and 
• a couple of general purpose bible commentary sets like Tyndale or BKC. But depending on what tradition you come from none of these may be suitable from your POV. 

Bear with if none of this seems relevant to you. 

After you've got a base collection based on what I suggested above, then you can buy books relevant to topics you want to research. 

For example, I'm reading a lot around the Genderism topic at the moment as its an issue I'm having to deal with in the education sector. 

And for this topic, Faithlife's ebooks store is great. 

After all that, many of the books I wanted to make searchable, weren't in the Logos inventory so I made personal books out of them. 

Feature upgrades (not books) are worth looking at too because they can greatly enhance what you can do within the system.

HTH and YMMV!