Search and Read Books at Amazon.com
We can now read and search hundreds or thousands of books at
Amazon.com, for free. Amazon calls it their “Search Inside the Book”
feature. To get full usage of this feature
one must first establish an account with Amazon (which involves providing
credit card information), but there is no charge involved. The utility of this feature was brought to my
attention by Dr. David Instone-Brewer, the Technical Officer at Tyndale House
in
Here are a couple examples of how this can work. Let’s imagine you want to find every place
where the word “curse” appears in the the first volume of the Old Testament
Pseudepigrapha, edited by James Charlesworth.
One would go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0385096305/ and enter “curse” (without the quotation marks) in the box that says “Search inside this book” and then click on the “Go!” (If you want to find two different words in close proximity [perhaps “curse blessing” or “law curse”] you could enter them in the box instead.) Then we arrive at a screen with links to all the pages where the word appears.
Note:
Although the page says there were “29 references to curse in this book” what it
means is that the word “curse” was found on 29 different pages of the book (the
word appears se
We can use the
arrows on the left and right-hand sides of the page image to read a couple more
pages on either side of these references if we want. To see the next page(s) where the word
appears we would use the “back button” on the Internet browser to return to the
page with the list of links to pages where the word appears in the book.
There is a secret
limit to how much you can read of any book.
After reaching your limit you may still search the book and see one of
the “hits” for each page, but you will not be able to go to the actual image of
the page and see where else the word or combination might appear. For that you would have to open up your hard
copy of the book and read/scan the indicated pages. (I have reached my limit with Charlesworth’s Pseudepigrapha
and still find it helpful to search the volumes and then find the references my
own copies of those volumes.)
Of course,
if you expect to read a significant part of the book you should find it in the
library or purchase a copy. Amazon would
be more than happy to sell you a copy of whichever book you are reading!
At my page
of Amazon links
you will find some of the hundreds of helpful works relating to biblical
studies that one can search and read at Amazon.com. Note that both evangelical and
non-evangelical works are included. (Please
note that not all of the links work all of the time. If one does not work when you try it, try
again later.)
This feature will make Amazon an essential resource for
people writing academic papers. If one
needs to write an exegesis paper on a passage of Scripture it will be possible
to read the relevant parts of many reference works and commentaries at
Amazon. One will also usually be able to
find many helpful resources from which to quote on almost any subject that
might be treated in a research paper.
This will be of particular value to students who do not have easy access
to a good university library. Distance
education may end up being transformed….
Enjoy your research and reading!
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary