Using Amazon’s ‘Search Inside’ feature to read books online

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com... Internet

Until Google closed the loophole, the method I demonstrated for using their Book Search to read any book online worked really well. Now I’m going to show you how to use Amazon’s ‘Search Inside’ feature for the same purpose… :D

 

1. Login to Amazon (UK) as usual.

2. Find the book that you want to read. It must have the ‘Search Inside’ feature indicated:

Find book (click to enlarge)

 

3. Click on the book cover to bring up the ‘Search Inside’ feature:

Search Inside (click to enlarge)

 

4. Above the front cover of the book, you’ve options to view different parts of the book. Click on ‘Table of Contents’:

Table of Contents (click to enlarge)

 

5. The table of contents should come up with chapters, page numbers, etc.

Table of Contents (click to enlarge)

 

6. Find the chapter, or in this case, article that you’re looking for. Note the author, title and page number at which it begins:

05.gif (click to enlarge)

 

7. Use the search function to type in the chapter/article title, using quotation marks:

Search (click to enlarge)

 

8. A list of places in the book where your search phrase appears is brought up. Find the page number of where the chapter/article you are interested in begins (in this case, p.46):

Search Results (click to enlarge)

 

9. Click on the relevant link to the page and the beginning of the chapter or article you were looking for will be brought up:

Beginning of chapter or article (click to enlarge)

 

10. You can go onto the next page by clicking the forward arrow, or by scrolling to the bottom and clicking ‘Next Page’. You’re only allowed to view 3 pages at a time, including the page you searched for.

 

11. Never fear, however! Simply find a phrase towards the end of the last page you are allowed to view:

Find phrase (click to enlarge)

 

12. Type this phrase into the search box, in quotation marks again:

Search for phrase (click to enlarge)

 

13. Find the page which you were just on and click on the link. You should now be able to view another three pages. Repeat as necessary… ;)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Bookmark:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • co.mments
  • del.icio.us
  • De.lirio.us
  • digg
  • Furl
  • Reddit
  • scuttle
  • Spurl
  • TailRank
  • YahooMyWeb
  Print This Post/Page Print This Post   View blog reactions

 

2 Responses to “Using Amazon’s ‘Search Inside’ feature to read books online”


  1. 1 Ed Podesta Mar 2nd, 2006 at 6:26 am

    Not wishing to be a pooper - but shouldn’t we be buying the books, or visiting the library, so that we’re (1) supporting academic research, or the particular author and (2) not breaking the law?

    Ed.

  2. 2 Doug Belshaw Mar 2nd, 2006 at 7:40 am

    I’m certainly not advocating that people should stop buying books. However, lets take the following example: you receive a reading list for one of the modules you are taking as part of a higher degree. A number of books, of which you only have to read a chapter, are not in the library. They’re about £30 to buy. This is a way to be able to do that reading… :)

Comments are currently closed.

Main RSS Feed

Subscribe to a feed of all Doug Belshaw

RSS feed for all of my blogs

   Timeline of all my posts

Locations of visitors to this page

Stats

  • 8 Users Online
  •  
  • 234,634 words in 803 posts
  •  
View Doug Belshaw's profile on LinkedIn
My status