I have spent a small amount of $$ on the various readers available for the iPT/iP. Currently I use Stanza, but neither Stanza, nor any of the other readers I have used compare to Mantis.

The ability to add bookmarks, notes, etc. sets Mantis head and shoulders above any other reader.

I wonder if there is any way to add non-scripture related books to Mantis?

I agree, in terms of pure literature there is no book to equal the Bible. And there is no other book more worth reading. But there are, simply, other books out there worth reading too.

Adding this ability would also bring a broader audience to Mantis, the Mantis website, and thereby, the Bible and its message of hope and ultimate salvation to a hurting needful world.

This is certainly possible, but we'd have to look into the logistics of it. Possibly the hardest part of this whole project (Mantis) is getting digital rights to things. If it were easy to get digital right to all the books, it'd be pretty easy to implement.

We are planning on releasing dozens (or eventually hundreds) of works by famous Christian authors in the coming year.

I agree that Mantis has some real advantages as a reader. There are a number of free books in digital form from Project Gutenberg. I have been using Stanza to read parts of Josephus' Antiquity of the Jews and Wars of the Jews - very poor search capability and no bookmarks or notes. And I like scrolling rather than turning a page.

The main draw back to mantisbible.com in allowing easy addition of other works into the mantis "shell" would be that you don't receive any revenue. For instance, currently, you charge a couple bucks for Charles Shedd's In His Steps. There are no digital rights issues to this document. It has been copyright free from the time it was first published, as Mr. Shedd explains in his preface to the edition you make available. And there are, as the reply above points out, hundreds of titles available through Gutenberg copyright free. Personally, I get my literature from manybooks.net.

For mantis to be usable as a reader, you would need to develop a converter app that would reside on a desktop/laptop, or perhaps on the iPT/iP. This converter app would allow a user to point it to a file on the desktop/laptop hardrive and convert that into a document that mantis would receive by webDav, or some other synching feature. mantisbible.com would, of course, charge some few or several bucks for the convertor app. And this would add to your revenue stream. It might make up in some small way for the loss you would see as people converted their own text documents into a mantis document.

Should you do this, I will make a couple suggestions. Allow the user to designate chapter breaks and such. The convertor app for Stanza doesnt do this and the breaks you end up with make no sense. Also, allow the person making the conversion to hyperlink the text. Though this may actually by what takes place with the cross-referencing capabilities of mantis as you explained to me in another post of mine. As a way to "grow" the mantisbible.com websites library of texts, anytime someone converts a text to mantis, make the convertor send a copy to mantisbible.com. If the document is a copyright free document, then include it on your website for download for a small cost, like In His Steps. Of course you will want the person making the conversion to know that they are relinquishing all rights to the document they have converted, ie, the conversion is not "theirs," but is in fact the copyrighted property of mantisbible.com, but they have a limited license to use it.

I think, as I said, Mantis is the best reader available. I would love to use it for all my reading so I can keep notes and cross references between and among my reading in one easy to find place. You could keep you product evangelical, as well, even if it were sold to someone who only wanted to use it as a general reader. Make it so the KJV of the Bible is automatically installed and can't be removed. Then, further, until they spend, say, 10 hours using the installed Bible, or until they install another version, make the KJV open each and everytime to John 3:16.

Another way to allow readers to use mantis as a general reader and still allow mantisbible.com to get some revenue from the library readers would develop on theior own would be to make the conversion occur through the mantisbible.com website. I have seen other websites that allow you to convert text to PDF and other conversions. I have no idea how they do it but it seems that the text streams in on the one side and is downloaded to you harddrive on the other. You could maybe do the same thing with mantisbible.com. Say I want Charles Dickens, A Christmas Story. I would get the text from, say, manybooks.net. Use your website's convertor to install it on my iPT/iP so I could read it using mantis. Then that document would reside on your website for anyone else to d/l for a nominal cost. Mantisbible.com would then own the copyright to the mantis version of A Christmas Story, in the same way a magazine that reprints A Christmas Story owns the copyright to that version.

Just trying to find a way to make the devs at matisbible.com see what a great idea making mantis a more general reader would be. :)