Fair questions, plain answers.

Today it is a digital book: a beautifully designed PDF and a reflowable EPUB, delivered to your inbox within about a minute of checkout. No shipping, no waiting, no app to install.

A printed edition is in the works. We have not promised a date, because print quality is worth getting right. Everyone who owns the ebook gets first access to the printed edition, at a discount, when it is ready.

Two files: a designed PDF that preserves the full book layout, and an EPUB that reflows to fit any screen. They work on your phone, tablet, computer, Kindle, Kobo, or any e-reader that opens EPUB files. There is no account to create and nothing to install. The files are yours, on every device you own.

Checkout runs on Stripe. The moment your payment goes through, a download email arrives from hello@theplainword.com with both files. If it has not landed within a few minutes, check spam, then write to us and we will send it directly.

The Plain Word is an original plain-English rendering based on the World English Bible, a public domain translation. It is neither a new translation from the original languages nor a loose paraphrase. We render the WEB text sentence by sentence into plain modern English, then check the result against the source verse by verse before it goes in the book.

Nothing is watered down. Every verse of all four Gospels is here with its meaning intact, and the hard sayings stay hard. Clarity changes the words, never the meaning.

Verse numbers were added by a printer in the 1550s so scholars could cite passages. They were never part of the original text, and on the page they chop sentences in half and turn a story into a list. Removing them is a big part of why this book reads like a book.

You lose nothing: every chapter is complete and clearly numbered, each opens with a plain summary, and behind the scenes every line is traceable to its source verses. If you want to compare a passage against another translation, the chapter reference gets you there in seconds.

We respect all three, and they aim at different readers. The NIV is a modern committee translation that still asks for a reading level many adults find heavy, and its text is copyrighted, so no one can rework its wording. The ICB is written for children and reads that way. The Message is one author's paraphrase, made for fresh devotional reading rather than verse-level precision.

The Plain Word is an original rendering based on the public domain World English Bible, written for adults, at a readability bar none of them attempt, with every verse's meaning checked against the source. Beautiful design is the other difference: this is a book you will want to keep reading, not a reference work.

It is an adult book. The design, the voice, and the content are written for grown readers. The readability bar is simply set high: a 2nd grader can read it alone, and a five-year-old can follow it read aloud.

That is exactly why parents love reading it at bedtime. One book works for the whole family without ever feeling like a children's product.

Read it for 30 days. If it does not read easier than any Bible you have opened, email hello@theplainword.com from the address you bought with and we refund your $27 in full, no questions asked. You keep the files; you cannot return a book like this, and we would not want you to.

It is the next release, and the promise is already locked: everyone who owns The Gospels gets the complete New Testament edition free when it ships. We have not announced a date, and we will not until it is close. Buyers hear first, by email, along with every free update to the current edition.