Well, it’s only been about 4 years since my last post, but in that time I’ve had tens of thousands of downloads of my Wide Margin Edition of the Book of Mormon PDF. This blog was never really meant to be a regular update of my life, but rather just a place to post resources that I’ve found or created that have helped me or might help others.

With that in mind, I recently had someone write to me and ask me to create a wide margin edition of “Come Follow Me—For Individuals and Families,” the manual for home study for 2019. This is a little bit of a different request; the scriptures are on a smaller page, so adding a wider margin and placing it on an 8.5×11 page isn’t too difficult. Doing this with “Come Follow Me” means that we have to shrink the existing type. This makes the resource a little more difficult to read, but it does free up some margin space for notes.

I’ve created the following PDF by shrinking the existing text by about 20%. Hopefully that gives the note-takers a little more space, while leaving the text readable.

Come Follow Me, For Individuals and Families (2019) Wide Margin Edition

You may also consider using the Wide Margin Edition of the New Testament, and keeping your notes in there. Here’s a link to that PDF.

New Testament – Wide Margin Edition

If you click on the links above, it may open the PDF in your browser. If you would like to instead download the file to your computer, simply right click on the link and select “Save link as…”

Happy studying!

Wow, a few months ago I posted the Wide Margin Edition of the Book of Mormon.  HUNDREDS of you have come here to download that PDF, which has been astonishing.  Some of you asked for editions of other standard works, and when the new revisions were released recently, you also asked for an updated PDF.  Well, I aim to please; ask and ye shall receive:

Book of Mormon

Doctrine and Covenants

Pearl of Great Price

Old Testament: Genesis-2 Samuel

Old Testament: 1 Kings-Malachi

New Testament

If this is your first time coming across these files, let me explain them a little bit.  These are the official PDF versions of the scriptures, straight from LDS.org.  All I did was go in and take the smaller sized pages, and increase the page size to letter size, without increasing the text size.  This provides you with a file that has the standard text and pagination of the standard works, but HUGE margins where you can write your thoughts, study notes, questions, quotes, lesson guides, references, or whatever you can come up with!  These are offered here free of charge.

To create your own copy, I’d suggest you print these out double-sided, and have them spiral bound so the volume can lay flat when open.  If you’d like, split the printing into two or more sections and bind separately (especially with the Old Testament) for easier writing.  Alternatively, you can three-hole-punch them and put them in a binder, but that just doesn’t look as cool.  I printed my own copy at home, but I had mine bound at the UPS store for somewhere around $5, with a stiff cover for the front and back to protect the pages.  The nice thing about these is that you can do whatever you want with them!  If you find some creative use, just come back and share it in the comments so others can use your nifty idea as well.

So there you have it!  As a side note, these editions are a little different than my first version of the Wide Margin Book of Mormon in the following ways:

• -I have not offset each left and right page an additional half inch from the center.  Leaving each page centered allows you to print the book one-sided if you’d like.  I originally thought about doing this,  as you’d have the margins of the page of text, plus a whole blank page on the left hand side.  That’s ridiculous amounts of writing space! Tempting, but it would be huge.
• -I did not increase the size of the text by 10% as I did in the first one.  While it was a little easier to read, it just wasn’t very noticable, and now your margins are just a teeny bit bigger as well.
• -I added a tiny disclaimer and reference on the inside of the title page.

I hope you enjoy!  Happy studying, scriptorians!

JAN 2014 EDIT: These links will still work for some of you, but to resolve many of the issues people were having with downloading these, I have uploaded them to Google Drive. See the new links HERE.

Years ago I saw one of the BYU Rountable Discussions on the Book of Mormon while I was flipping through the channels and landed on BYUTV. It was actually quite interesting, so I went to the website to see what the program was all about. There was a series for every set of the standard works! It was like having a BYU religion class in your living room! Great! Except I didn’t have time to watch several hundred episodes right then.

I saw that they offered an audio download option for all of the episodes and I downloaded the MP3s in hopes of beginning to listen to them, but I never did. Then I forgot about them, then my hard drive crashed, and I figured I could just download them again sometime if I wanted to. Several years have passed, and now I’m living in Idaho with 45 minutes of commute each day and I’m looking for something to listen to as I go to work. I had already finished the Sped-Up Book of Mormon in a few months, and remembered these old MP3s!  I went to the BYUTV site and could see the videos available for streaming, but couldn’t find the MP3s.  I searched the web, but nothing.  I searched torrents, no luck.  They were gone.

So I hopelessly wrote to BYUTV and asked where I could find them.  The response amazed me. A super nice shout out to Stephanie and Kaylee who sent me this email:

Dear Brad,

Thank you for your email. We are happy to hear that you have benefited from the Scripture Roundtable Discussions. As you correctly noted, these are no longer available in the audio format that you have been accessing. You’d be surprised to know that the cost to make these available was relatively high and since we didn’t have many users accessing the audio format, we decided to utilize our resources to support other services that are accessed by a wider audience.

However, if you would like to reply to this email with your address, we would be happy to send you the audio format of these discussions in the mail. If you have any other comments or questions, please feel free to contact us at 866-662-9888.

Have a great day!

Awesome!  Not sure how hosting the MP3s was really that expensive, but the fact that they were going to send me a copy for free boggled my mind.  I offered to pay, they refused.  Go BYU! A few days later in the mail, I received a DVD with 137 HOURS of audio!  Holy cow!  I burned the Pearl of Great Price series and Doctrine and Covenants series to an MP3 CD and began listening the next morning.

After having listened to these for about a month now, back and forth, I have to say that they are really amazing.  It has helped me to have more positive thoughts, understand the gospel better, understand church history better, and gain a greater testimony of the scriptures.  These are seriously a really great thing if you’re needing something to listen to on a commute.  So though you can write to BYUTV and have them mail you a copy of the program, I figured I’d upload it here.  If you’d like to download the entire set, all 4.1GB of it, click on the link and then be prepared to wait quite a while for it to download.  It’s in a .RAR format, so you’ll need something like WinZip, 7-Zip, or WinRAR to unpack it. But it’s worth it, I promise.

AllBYUDiscussions.rar

I will issue one caveat.  In the Pearl of Great Price Discussions – which are great – Joseph Fielding McConkie drives me insane.  By the end I was getting ready to pull my hair out every time he paused before the last word in a sentence.  “Joseph Smith’s greatest revelation was obviously about the………………………Abrahamic Covenant.”  Just a heads up.  Enjoy.

This is my old copy, with lots of markings and thoughts in the margins and text.

****UPDATE: A new edition created from the 2013 revised edition of the scriptures is available here. Also, all four standard works are now available! Check it out!****

At the bottom of this post you’ll find a link for a PDF copy of the Wide Margin Edition of the Book of Mormon, a perfect gift for a student, missionary, or family member!

The Story Behind the Project:

As a missionary in Minnesota, my mission president encouraged us to take 10 days and study the Book of Mormon deeply and intensely, and write down every thought in the margins.  We spent one day on each of the first ten pages of the Book of Mormon.  It was awesome: looking up every reference, thinking about the meaning of words, considering parallel ideas and themes. I continued this for the rest of my mission, at a slightly quicker pace, and spent 8 months going through it a couple hours a day.  This old copy is one of my most prized posessions. The only problem? Not enough margin space.  I looked into getting the super-huge print edition, but there were still tiny margins to write in.  What I dreamed of was a copy with HUGE margins.  But alas, none existed.

A few years after my mission, I started thinking about how I could do this.  On my first attempt I took a copy of the BoM meant for day planners, and photocopied each page onto a full 8.5×11 page.  It took way too long, and was not easily reproducable.  A few years later, I found the official PDF version put out by the Church and wondered, could I use Acrobat to modify the PDF and make a HUGE margin edition that I could share and reprint when needed? Oh yeah.

My WIDE margin edition, with a few notes, and LOTS more room for future study!

So I increased the text size a little, and added huge margins, then printed out a bunch of copies for myself, my family, and several missionaries that I knew out in the field.  I loved it, and then I began wondering how I could get this out to the general public.  And could I make some money for producing these? It only costs $5 to bind and put covers on it at the UPS store, but the printing costs would probably be so much that I couldn’t make a profit off of it.  So I scapped the idea. Then I thought, “Well, I have that old website, why don’t I post it on there for everyone?”

So here it is.  A PDF copy of the Wide Margin Edition of the Book of Mormon.  Print the PDF, double-sided, on a laser printer, or take it to a copy and print shop and have them print it for you.  Spiral bound it so it lays flat. Then mark it up to your heart’s desire.  It becomes more personal and deep than any other scripture study method that I’ve ever tried.  I hope it works for you, and if it does, please leave a comment and tell me how you’ve enjoyed it.

The PDF File:

Download the Book of Mormon – Wide Margin Edition by right-clicking on this link, then selecting “Save Target As…”  Or you can just click on it normally and use Acrobat Reader to save a copy to your computer.  Enjoy!