Four translations and an audio edition came with the app. Read in any of them, hold one passage in several at once, and nothing needs downloading.
What You Can Read
- ESV — English Standard Version. Crossway, 2001. A literal translation in the King James line, and the one FerventWord App opens with.
- BSB — Berean Standard Bible. Bible Hub, 2016 and revised in 2020. Modern English, given freely for anyone to use.
- KJV — King James Version. The traditional English Bible, in the English of its own century. Public domain.
- ASV — American Standard Version, 1901. A very literal American revision of the King James. Public domain.
- ESV + Audio — the ESV text, with a recording read aloud.
All of them are in the app download. There is nothing to fetch and nothing to set up: open the app on a plane, on the first day, and you have the whole Bible in every one of them. Nothing can be removed, and nothing needs to be.
Menu → Versions & Copyrights carries each edition's own notice and who publishes it.
ESV + Audio
Choose ESV + Audio the way you choose any other version, and a Listen row appears in the reading bar's More menu.
The words are on your device like every other edition. Only the recording is streamed, so listening is the one thing here that needs a connection — reading does not. Playback keeps going when you lock the screen, and you can pause it from the lock screen or your headphones.
Settings → Versions holds Play Audio Passage — anything from once to ten times, or until you stop it. Stopping, or choosing another passage, ends it whatever that says.
Highlights you made in the ESV stay exactly where you put them if you switch between ESV and ESV + Audio: they are the same words.
Your Default Version
Settings → Versions holds your Default Version — the one a passage opens in when it has none of its own. Turn on Set Default Versions For Bookmarks to give the second and third bookmarks a version of their own, so the same passage can sit side by side in different words. The first bookmark always follows the Default Version.
Switching
Tap More in the reading bar to change version. The one you are reading is shown under the chapter name at the top of the screen.
Choosing a version there changes that bookmark only, and it stays until you clear the bookmark. That is what lets you put one passage in all three bookmarks, set each to a different version, and move between them.
A reading plan carries its own version too, chosen when you set the plan up and changed in the plan's own screen. You might follow one plan in the ESV and a Proverb a day in something else; tapping a reminder opens the version that plan names.
How Editions Differ
Versions differ from one another in small ways that are not mistakes. A handful of verses appear in one version and not in another, because the earliest manuscripts do not all carry them; where that happens, FerventWord App shows the note the translators wrote about it. Section headings, red letter and italicised words are choices each edition makes, so a version that does not use them is not missing anything.