Attention, viewers: this week's installment of Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day has been canceled. Why, you ask? Well, mostly because there's been so precious little actual Apple-related plot fodder this week that anything even slightly off-topic would throw off the tenuous balance of the show. Indeed, a seemingly innocuous act as small as, say, linking to Floating Henry Rollins Head Haiku might well produce a shift of focus so catastrophic that millions would perish in a seismic event of biblical proportions.

Which means we, um, probably shouldn't have linked to that just now. Whoops. Well, nothing much bad seemed to happen this time. But trust us, we were lucky.

So instead of bagging on Microsoft in our typically facile yet breezy manner, we thought we'd stick to a slightly more on-topic, er, topic: bibles for iPods. This may be old hat to you, but it was news to us; according to CNET, there's an LA-based start-up named BiblePlayer that provides free downloads of the Holy Bible that you can upload to your iPod and read via the player's "Notes" feature. And lest you think this is just some typo-riddled public domain text file slapped onto the iPod with no added value, take another look; the entire King James version of both Old and New Testaments is carefully organized into books, chapters, and verses, there's a whole slew of devotionals and bible stories added in, and if you've always wanted to read the Bible but have an attention span that would only let you if it were presented in sitcom-length installments, BiblePlayer even has a built-in method of doling out just enough each day so you can finish in a year. And if you're willing to shell out $29 for the "Deluxe" version on CD, you also get the whole thing in audio format as well, linked right to the Notes text via convenient "PLAY" links.

Personally, this isn't exactly subject matter we feel we need to carry with us everywhere we go (call us when someone does this with Ulysses and we'll talk), but it does show how far the iPod's built-in features can be stretched-- in this case, to create what is essentially a hybrid e-text and audiobook format that knocks the standard "one big audio file" paradigm into a cocked hat. Trust us, we'd be a lot more likely to buy those Audible.com audiobooks offered in the iTunes Music Store if they were accompanied by the actual book text linked to the corresponding audio portions, and offered extras like interviews with the authors and notes on the text.

Unfortunately, it's not really doable quite yet. BiblePlayer's Pablo Mendigochea complains that the iPod "offers 20 GB of memory for music but less than 5 GB for text," which at first seems an odd thing to moan about, since 5 GB of textual storage could hold over 4600 copies of Moby Dick; indeed, the complete BiblePlayer set of textual data (including the new and old testaments, the devotionals, the stories, and the "Bible-in-a-year" feature) is only 8.3 MB on disk, meaning that, size-wise, at least, you could cram over 600 copies onto an iPod-- so just how many bibles does this guy want to carry around, anyway?

But what he's really getting at isn't the total storage available, but rather the limitations to Notes themselves, including a 4 KB-per-note limit (about 700 words-- this AtAT scene would just barely fit, but this episode's first scene wouldn't) and a 1000-note maximum. The 1000-note limit, in particular, means that you can't currently load all the BiblePlayer files at once; you have to pick which books of the Bible to carry with you at any given time. So before it could start hawking a new combo eBook/audiobook format at the iTMS, Apple would have to relax some of those constraints-- or better yet, create a new "Books" architecture and leave "Notes" alone. Suppose it could happen?