Digital or Paper?

One of my big dilemmas is that I'm a gadget geek and a book buyer. I love the feel of a new book, the smell of a new book, and the joy of laying in bed reading a book. But, I also love highly searchable, cross reference-able digital texts.

I'm debating whether to buy BDAG — the premier Greek-English lexicon — in its impressive print form or to buy it in its less impressive, but perhaps more convenient digital form for Accordance. I've been using Accordance for a few weeks while preparing to review it at OFB and have found it sufficiently impressive that I've been considering the option of buying modules for it.

In fact, I did invest in a handful of modules. I bought the Scholar's Core to compliment the Library Premier package that I received to review. The Library Premier is a superb package that hits a bit of everything so that one has a nice start to a library (two good modern translations, a voucher good for three more modern translations worth up to $30 each, a boatload of commentaries, Thayer's lexicon and some other nice things), but Scholar's rounded it out with a few essential items: a Nestle-Aland 27th edition (as opposed to the Library's Textus Receptus), the UBS Lexicon, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Louw and Nida Semantic Domain Lexicon. The NA27, BHS and Louw and Nida were the primary items of interest to me. Using the digital Louw and Nida reminds me of why I should probably buy the digital BDAG: it is just so much easier to look things up using Accordance's triple click “Amplify” to my lexicons than it is to flip through a giant lexicon looking for the word I want.

Nevertheless, my inner bookworm wishes I could buy the printed version combined with a license to a digital copy… now that would be nice! Then again, I may hold off on BDAG completely, if I can — what has me really intrigued is the CNTTS Greek Apparatus which should be extremely useful once they get the Pauline epistles included in it. Reading the article about it that is attached to that link makes it sound like just about the perfect apparatus. I hope it stays at $100 in its final form.