Since the 2011 edition of the NIV was released for PocketBible, there’s been some confusion about how to tell the difference between the old and new versions when downloading or opening them in PocketBible. To make things even more complicated, there are two editions of both the 1984 and the 2011 versions of the NIV — one with and one without cross-references.

Today we took a couple steps toward clearing that up. First, when downloading the NIV — either at our website or from within PocketBible for iPhone or Android — you’ll see the “old” NIV identified as “New International Version (1984 NIV)”. There’s currently no difference between the name of the standard and cross-reference editions, but in PocketBible you can look at the size of the files to figure out which is which. The cross-reference edition is the larger of the two. When downloading from our website, you’ll see “XR” in the filename of the cross-reference edition.

Both in PocketBible and on the website the 2011 NIV will be called “New International Version (NIV)”. The cross-reference edition is called “New International Version (NIV Cross Ref Edition)”.

Of course when you purchase the NIV you’re always purchasing the latest version, which is the 2011 version of the text.

The second change is in the “Open Book” functionality of the iPhone and Android programs. The next release of each of these programs will be able to distinguish between these four editions of the NIV better than the current releases do. But you’ll have to wait to see these versions of the program; the iPhone version will be uploaded to the App Store today and is awaiting Apple’s approval, and the Android version is still in process.

In the meantime, the 1984 NIV will appear as “The Holy Bible: New International Version” in your list of Bibles and the 2011 NIV will be simply “New International Version”. The only way to tell the difference between the cross-reference and non cross-reference versions is to open them up and look. One way around this is to only install one or the other. And in the iPhone version you can disable the display of footnotes, which would allow you to just download the cross-reference edition and turn notes off if you don’t want to see the cross references.

The features that were rolled into the code today will allow us to distinguish situations like this better in the future, once the changes propagate through all our readers and we update the affected books and Bibles.