Where can I access digital editions of the Book of Mormon?
Answer
Images taken from early editions of the Book of Mormon and the printer’s manuscript can be found on the Joseph Smith Papers website and in the Church History Catalog:
- Printer’s manuscript, digitized for 2015 Joseph Smith Papers
- Printer’s manuscript, 1923 photostatic copies
- 1830 edition
- 1837 edition
- 1840 edition
- 1841 edition
- 1849 edition
A time line showing the emergence of these and other editions can be found at ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
Images of the original manuscript will be made available on the Joseph Smith Papers website sometime in 2022 or 2023 and will be published as Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon.
Church scholars continue to exhaustively research the differences between Book of Mormon manuscripts; their work can be explored at the Joseph Smith Papers Project and the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. These sites offer access to various editions of the Book of Mormon as well as analysis of the textual changes that occurred between editions. (For more information on textual changes to the Book of Mormon, see question 2 below.)
The Church History Library houses over 700 unique English copies of the Book of Mormon. To search for these copies of the Book of Mormon, perform a call number search for M222.1 B724 in the Church History Catalog. You can use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to narrow your search by publication year, genre, subject, format, and more.