Behind the Scenes: What Happens When Your Book Gets Updated?

One of the best parts of owning a book in Logos is that it’s constantly updated for free.

If you pay careful attention, you might notice new links and other obvious updates. But most of the updates happen under the hood—like updates to milestones, data types, and other pieces of functionality that make Logos books shine.
Here’s an example of the work we did on one of our resources, the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary.

Updating the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary

The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary is just under 7,300,000 words long. After looking at user-submitted typo reports and going over the entire dictionary ourselves, we identified around 800 typos, and fixed all of them. Or, to put it differently, we went from 99.989% accuracy to as close to 100% as possible. (I’m hesitant to say we hit 100%, because with a work this big, it’s inevitable that we—and all our users—missed one.)

This is even more impressive when you consider that 20% of the words in the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary are in languages other than English: Aramaic, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Dutch, Norwegian, and a few other languages. There are also 61,141 words transliterated into English. That means finding typos is a little more complicated than running a spellchecker.

How We Fix Typos

Fixing typos isn’t as clear cut as it sounds. For some words, there isn’t a clear consensus on the correct spelling, like gray and grey. And a surprisingly large number of typos aren’t actually typos—they’re submitted by U.S. users encountering U.K. spelling, and vice versa. Many U.K. users report words like center as a typo, but U.S. users report centre. (As a general rule, we follow the print edition.) Other words are reported because they’re unfamiliar: we’ve received multiple reports of pine nut as a typo, with pine cone as the suggested correction. But a pine nut is a real thing, and it’s possibly referenced in Song of Songs 6:11.

For some of our resources, it’s not unusual to check a typo report against the print edition, only to find the typo exists in print as well. Fortunately this isn’t a problem with the print edition of the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, but with 22,000 books in Logos, there are bound to be typos even in well-proofed print source material. But unlike print, the Logos edition can be updated.

More Than Typo Updates

In addition to the typo fixes in the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, we also added 4,810 bibliographic milestones. We added links for 39,080 bibliographic citations—both to resources already in your library and to resources that don’t yet exist, but will someday. We also linked thousands of references to 61 new data types.

The Anchor Bible Dictionary is just one of around 22,000 resources available in Logos. At any given time, we’re making thorough updates to hundreds of books, adding links, functionality, and other tweaks to make your books shine in current and future versions of Logos. All the updates work on all your devices—Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and Biblia.com. You always have access to the latest and greatest.

The best part? You get the updates automatically—absolutely free.

There’s nothing extra you need to do to get the latest, polished version. Nothing to buy. Nothing to click. It all happens in the background, all for free.

That means if you own the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, you already have all the updates described above. If you don’t own it, now is the perfect time to get it.