Given the interest on this forum in early Advent literature, including the Spirit of Prophecy and various other authors like William Miller, I thought I would make a technical post that relates to this.
I personally have not done much with smartphones over the years. I recently took a look at what I have, and realized that it would be considered obsolete, and I decided to upgrade.
So about a month ago, I got a new Android smartphone.
Once I had the phone, I started looking around to see what Android apps are available that are suitable for doing spiritual study.
I first looked at a number of Bible apps, and eventually decided to go with e-Sword. I have the app configured with the KJV and ESV Bibles at the center. These are study Bibles, and included are various auxiliary tools such as cross reference and Hebrew/Greek support.
I've also downloaded a variety of public domain commentaries and dictionaries that are provided with the app, with familiar names like Barnes, Clarke, Easton, and Smith.
This particular app is classified as "premium" on the Google Play Store, and this means that a one-time charge of $2.99 was applied to my credit card when I downloaded the app.
I then looked at the Spirit of Prophecy area, and downloaded "EGW Writings 2" from the Google Play Store. I was not charged for this download.
The configuration of this app is such that you're asked initially about installing a core set of 120 Spirit of Prophecy books, with additional downloads possible after the fact.
In my particular case, I have home Internet service provided by Xfinity via cable, and the Xfinity modem sitting on my desk provides a local WiFi signal.
The WiFi is very fast, and because of this, I chose to download everything that is made available, and ended up with a set of more than 1400 items. This includes a large number of additional Spirit of Prophecy resources, for example Devotionals, Periodicals, and Manuscript Releases.
This also includes many pioneer authors, for example Joseph Bates, William Miller, and Uriah Smith, and many of these authors are grouped into a collection called "Adventist Pioneer Library", with about 675 items in it.
This particular collection also includes some more recent authors, for example Froom's "Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers" and "Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers".
Since I downloaded everything, the installed app is relatively large, and is reported at around 5 GB in size, which is pretty big for an Android app.
Whether downloading everything makes sense depends on several factors, including interest in particular authors, the availability of WiFi versus cell networks, and the availability of smartphone storage for the various databases.
I am a long-time Bible and Spirit of Prophecy student, and have done most of my study using various apps on my desktop PC, and am always on the lookout for additional study tools. Both of the apps mentioned above seem to have a lot of potential.
I have the old EGW app on my not-so-smart phone (version 1) and like it for reading while I'm on the train, etc.
My Bible app is MySword.
Everything is free on my phone, and I make it a point to never go to Google Play Store. That limits choices a lot, but I despise Google (except for Youtube - ha!). If I ever got a real smart phone, I would definitely buy a de-googled one (such as Brax phone), so Google couldn't track everything I did on the net, and where I physically was located - scary stuff.
I wonder if you could tell me how many items are in the "Letters and Manuscripts"? I only downloaded from 1880 - 1915, so don't know the entire number, but am guessing it is around 10,000. If it's too much trouble to figure out, don't worry about it.
The Bates autobiography was mentioned, and this item is indeed available as part of the "Adventist Pioneer Library" that I mentioned. The tag is "AJB" -- "The Autobiography of Elder Joseph Bates".
Earlysda asked about the number of items in "Letters and Manuscripts". This collection shows up in the Spirit of Prophecy section, and the bulk of the collection is called "Bound Volumes", and there are 25 items in "Bound Volumes".
However, if you then click on one of these volumes, like "Volume 21 (1906)", there are hundreds of actual letters and manuscripts listed, and I don't know the total count.
It may be useful to play this out with a recent example. A few days ago, I was looking at Mar 193, about the United States in prophecy, and wondered about the underlying origin of this quote. So I searched on the phrase "bring in enterprises" using the CD-ROM, and found only the Mar 193 item.
I then searched on my smartphone, using the same phrase, and found the answer to my question, and here is the relevant paragraph:
"But the enemy of all righteousness has designs upon Gods purpose for this country. He will bring in enterprises that will lead men to forget that there is a God. Worldliness and covetousness, which is idolatry, will prevail through the working of the archdeceiver, till the law of God, in all its bearings, shall be made void.21LtMs, Ms 17, 1906, par. 2"
In other words, the origin is Letters and Manuscripts, Bound Volume 21, Manuscript 17, 1906.
With regard to what Earlysda said about Google tracking and location and so on, I will say the following. I am 67 years old, and by training am a software developer, and have been in the software business for around 50 years. I have never been particularly enthusiastic about smartphones, and privacy is one of my big concerns.
However, we live in an imperfect world, and in thinking and praying this issue through in the last few months, I decided that I needed to modernize in this area, and thus the new Android smartphone.
I tend to be quite conservative in my usage, for example turning on Airplane Mode most of the time, which disables WiFi and cell tower access.
In my first posting above, I talked about downloading lots of spiritual databases, and this is one of the key criteria I use when installing apps on smartphones -- is the app usable when network access is disabled?
I tend to limit my usage of the smartphone features that require network access, or that involve privacy issues. The use of email services and cloud storage for backing up files are examples of this -- some very private alternatives exist, but you need to be careful if privacy is a concern.
Thank you for your detailed response, refulgent. I'm using EGW Writings 2, version 5.0.0.
And I see I have 8153 of 9336 "Letters and Manuscripts", which I had not noticed before.
I have all the L&M from 1880 on, so that means the other 1,183 are before that.
None of mine are in anything called "Bound Volumes".
Even just for checking this, I made sure the wifi was off before opening the app, as it has either deleted or hidden several of the letters and manuscripts after I read them, which is quite frustrating. Yes, it may very well be just a setting that I've overlooked.
When on my computer, I like to use:
m dot egwwritings dot org
for my Ellen White writing search. As there is so much to search thru, I too find it best to use a seldom-used phrase, put it in double quote marks, and then search. If you don't, you'll get all results for material with those words anywhere in the paragraph it seems.
What are the "enterprises" she is talking of in this instance? IDK.
5GB would be 1/5 of all the data I get a month! And with my slow wifi, it would probably take over an hour to download even if I wanted all of it.
On a side note, on Youtube recently there was a "Dr. Alan Davis" who was explaining why he didn't believe in Ellen White anymore. He says he used to be employed by Weimar and Amazing Facts, so I was interested in what he had to say. Sadly, it was the same misunderstanding of her writings that many Sunday keepers give, showing me that he wasn't really serious about the subject, and that there was something either he was doing or believing that he didn't want to give up. He also is anti-trinity. Anyway, I state this to say that he mentioned to me that he had read "all the writings" of Ellen White. I didn't believe him, and told him so, which infuriated him.
My question to readers of this is: Do you think anyone alive has ever read all the writings of Ellen White, and if so, about how many people do you think have done that?
I would like to follow up on a couple of things that Earlysda said.
1. He mentioned having all the Letters & Manuscripts from 1880 on.
As I mentioned, the material I have on my smartphone is divided into what are called "Bound Volumes", and the first three of these cover the periods 1844-1868, 1869-1875, and 1876-1882. Each of these volumes has hundreds of individual items in it, so presumably the total here would be in the thousands.
2. I don't know if anyone has read all the writings of Ellen White. I expect the first step in trying to answer this question would be to get an authoritative list of everything she ever wrote, and whether such a list exists I can't say. The White Estate has support email addresses that could be used to query them about this.
There are various issues that arise in trying to answer this question. For example, there are multiple editions of the "Great Controversy", as well as the four-volume series "Spirit of Prophecy" that is related, and thus it's not clear what would be meant by doing an exhaustive reading of this book.
3. In my own study over the years, I have found it helpful to focus on particular spiritual topics, and collect inspired material on these topics.
For example, this morning I was looking at what the Bible and EGW say about "polished stones" vs. "living stones", and I assembled a list of Bible verses into a text file, and several groups of EGW quotes into folders of text files. An example of the quotes I found is the one below.
Some Are Not What They Appear. -- Many, from worldly policy, endeavor, by their own efforts, to become as polished stones, but cannot be living stones, because they are not built upon the true foundation. The day of God will reveal that they are, in reality, only hay, wood, and stubble. {3BC 1154.7}
I thought it might be useful to update this thread with some new information.
I have used Bible and Spirit of Prophecy software on smartphones, as described above, and doing so works pretty well. However, the small screen and virtual keyboard sizes can be a chore to work with.
I recently noticed that a 9-inch Android tablet (Lenovo M9) is on sale for less than $100 in the USA, and I decided to give it a try.
What is meant by a 9-inch tablet is basically this:
orientation - portrait
width - 5.5 inches
height - 8.5 inches
upper left to lower right diagonal - 9.75 inches
thickness - 0.25 inch
I did a bit of calculation and determined that the tablet has about 2.5X the screen space of a smartphone, which means that it's more readily usable for running apps like the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy ones.
The tablet fits comfortably in my left hand, and is light enough that I can use it for extended periods of time.
The tablet has 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of internal memory, a USB 2.0 port, and a slot where a micro SD card can be installed if desired, to support additional storage. The tablet uses revision 13 of the Android operating system, which is fairly recent. The tablet is not a phone, and uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for communication.
I downloaded the Spirit of Prophecy app ("EGW Writings 2") from the Google Play Store, using Wi-Fi, and was not charged anything for doing so.
Once I did this, I found that I had a series of what are called "Collections" on my tablet, for example "Books" (120 items), "Pamphlets" (204 items), "Reference" (213 items), and "Adventist Pioneer" (677 items). The total set of items is very large.
By default, these collections are really only links to what is available online. But you are given the option to actually download everything within a collection, and I went through all the collections and did so. This process took less than an hour with a fast Wi-Fi connection.
When I completed this task, the resulting app is reported as being 5.3 GB in size, which is about 10 percent of the available internal storage (64 GB). This is the largest application I have installed on the tablet.
This large app size is not an issue if the primary focus is using the tablet as a study tool, and having all resources local means that the app can be used effectively offline, that is, when Wi-Fi is not available. When I invoke the app in this context, I get a message "Offline mode is enabled".
If I try searching for a phrase, for example "absolute truth", across all collections, the search takes a fraction of a second, and I am presented with a summary list of 51 search hits. I can tap on a hit to have the search phrase presented to me in context in another window, and can use this scheme to efficiently step through the search hits.
If I want to read a specific book or other resource, I can easily do so. For example, I tried selecting the "Books" collection, and then "Steps to Christ", and then Chapter 6 "Faith and Acceptance".
Whether reading books in this way is better or worse than having an actual literal book in your hand really depends on a variety of factors. It is possible to set the font size and the background and so on, such that reading from the screen can be done without too much strain. A device like this can be used to carry around literally thousands of items like books, and obviously being able to do so is a major advantage in various circumstances, for example while traveling.
I also have installed some Bible study software, using an app called "AndBible". This includes the KJV and NASB versions of the Bible, along with Strong's Hebrew and Greek support, the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge for cross references, and various commentaries and dictionaries like Barnes and Jameson Fausset Brown. The app size is reported as 200 MB.
I have found that this particular app smoothly integrates the various features, so that it's easy to study a particular Bible passage in depth, looking at multiple translations, Hebrew and Greek, cross references, and so on.
I have found in my long-term spiritual study that it's really helpful to have various study tools available, so that I can check things out for myself, and go deeper in my study, and what I've described above represents one approach to doing so.
