How to Expand Your Research Materials with Amazon

Biblical scholars need materials for research.1 And you can access quite a lot through your libraries.

In addition, there are also several good places to go online when you need access something. One of these is Amazon.

Amazon as Bookseller

Of course, on Amazon, you can buy books. And the prices you’ll find there are often very competitive. But Amazon can also be a particularly helpful place to conduct research, even if you don’t buy something.

One of the best things about physical bookstores is cracking open a book and reading some of it for yourself. Amazon originally focused on selling books but has now obviously expanded quite far beyond that.2 Even so, they still try to mimick the experience of opening and previewing a physical book.

Looking Inside

So, here enters the “Look inside” option. “Look inside” isn’t available for every book—particularly if it’s a new or prerelease title.

But many titles will have this option. And when one does, you’ll see it over the upper-right hand corner of the book’s cover picture. To start previewing such a book, simply click the cover to “pick it up.”

Partial product page from Amazon showing the "Look inside" option for the book displayed on the page

Most helpful here are the search tool and the options under the menu button at the left. Sometimes these are a bit different, but generally what you’ll find are things like:

  • Front cover: This link takes you directly to the front cover of the book.
  • First Pages: Just as it sounds, this link takes you directly to the first few pages in the volume. This might be the frontmatter, preface, forward, introduction, or first chapter. It just depends on how the links are done for that individual volume.
  • Back Cover: If you’re interested in endorsements for the volume or information about the author, you can use this link to jump to the back cover, which will often have information like this. In hardbacks with dust covers, sometimes you might see links for the front and back flaps in addition to or instead of a back cover link.
  • Surprise Me!: This link mimics the experience of flipping open a book at random and looking at whatever you happen to find there.

Use Cases

As with Google, Amazon will only show you some of a book’s pages due to copyright law. Even so, Amazon’s “Look inside” option can give you helpful information about a volume or its contents in several scenarios:

  1. With the copyright page preview, you can confirm bibliographic data. For instance, you might inter-library loan a chapter from a book but not get all of its publication information. Being able to “look inside” it on Amazon can be a good way to fill in what’s missing for your citation or bibliography.
  2. From the table of contents, you might be able to navigate to various sections of a book or confirm where a particular section ends.
  3. If you use the index or have found a reference to a given page and want to see that page, you can try typing the page number into the search box. This won’t always give you the page you’re looking for, and sometimes you need to look through a longer list of places in the book where the same number occurs. But by searching for the page number or another keyword, you’ll often be able to turn up a page or section that you need even if it’s not directly linked to elsewhere.
  4. If you already have a copy of the book, you can use the search box to help you find that quotation you half remember but can’t seem to turn up again in your physical copy.
  5. You might find that Amazon allows you to preview different pages than Google Books does, or vice versa. So, if you can’t preview what you need with one, it might be worth searching the other.

Conclusion

In the end, the same caution applies to Amazon as with Google Books. You always want to be sure you haven’t inadvertently misunderstood an argument simply because you’ve only read the portions of it that are available in an online preview.

That said, Amazon’s previews can make it easier for you to access some parts of some of the books you need for your research.

A hammer isn’t a substitute for a screw driver, but that doesn’t mean you can only ever use a screw driver. Similarly, while neither Amazon’s nor Google’s previews substitute for having a fuller copy of an argument all together, they can be valuable in making certain kinds of research jobs easier than they would have been otherwise.


  1. Header image provided by César Viteri

  2. Jillian D’Onfro, “Look at How Much Amazon Has Changed since It First Launched,” Business Insider, 20 March 2015. 

Bauckham, “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” (2nd ed.)

Bauckham, "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" (2nd ed.) coverAvailable from Eerdmans is the second edition of Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. According to Eerdmans,

in this expanded second edition Bauckham has added a new preface, three substantial new chapters that respond to critics and clarify key points of his argument, and a comprehensive new bibliography.

For more information or to order, see Eerdmans’s website, Amazon, or other booksellers.

Back to School with Kindle

According to Amazon,

Special pricing is available on select Kindle Fire tablets to Amazon Student members with an active Prime account (six months free or $39/year plan). Join Amazon Student or start your discounted Prime membership to take advantage of this discount. The promo codes below will become available 24 hours after activation of your account, through September 1. New members, don’t forget to check your .edu email and verify your account.

How to Take Advantage of This Offer:

1. Place one of the tablets below in your cart.

2. At checkout, enter the appropriate promo code when prompted:

FIREHD89: Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ for $199
FIREHDST: Kindle Fire HD for $149
FIREDEAL: Kindle Fire for $129

If you are an Amazon Student member in a free or paid Prime plan, the discount will be applied to the corresponding item in your cart.

3. Complete your order before this promotion expires at 11:59 p.m. PST on September 1, 2013.

Though not all of equal merit, there are safely over 116,000 texts related to Judaism and Christianity now available on the Kindle platform (HT: Tara Kuczykowski via Carrie Stark)

Upcoming Logos Resources (August 28, 2013)

Recently, I noted that an English Standard Version audio Bible was freely available with registration at Bible.is. This version’s Old Testament is also still freely available in MP3 format on Amazon.

Logos Bible Software

In addition to these, Logos Bible Software is now giving away the ESV audio Bible read by David Cochran Heath. This resource “is available for streaming only and cannot be stored on your device. A reliable internet connection is required for use,” but it does sync “word-for-word” with the Logos ESV text.

Other noteworthy, upcoming Logos resources include:

Kindling Cave 4?

Amazon’s selection of texts available for the Kindle platform occasionally includes some interesting oddities. For instance, those who really want to do so can apparently read the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert volumes 10 (4QMMT) and 16 (cave 4 calendrical texts) on Kindle for a mere $239.20 and $254.34 respectively, without print-equivalent page numbers. Or, used hard covers are available for just under $180. 😉