The Book of Mormon Editions Project is an independent, nonpartisan digital resource dedicated to documenting and presenting the historical textual development of the Book of Mormon. Its purpose is to provide readers, researchers, and students with clear, direct access to multiple published editions, enabling careful study and transparent comparison over time.

All textual data used in this project is sourced from the
BYU Open Scripture Project , whose meticulous work in digitizing historical editions of the Book of Mormon has made rigorous textual study possible. This project gratefully acknowledges their contribution and relies on their data as its authoritative textual foundation.

This project seeks to present historical textual data as accurately and transparently as possible, without interpretation or editorial bias. While absolute neutrality is impossible, I value openness and clarity. I therefore acknowledge that I am a member in good standing of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and personally believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.

Features

Read Complete Editions

Read the complete text of each of the following edition with clean, consistent formatting:
1830, 1837, 1840, 1841, 1879, 1920, 1981, and 2013
Browse editions →

See Inline Differences

Compare editions with inline highlights showing additions, deletions, and modifications.
Try a comparison →

Screenshot of 1830 with 2013 comparison

Simultaneous View

View all editions at once to quickly compare changes.
Open simultaneous view →

Screenshot of simultaneous view

Track All Changes

Browse a comprehensive, structured record of textual changes across editions.
View all changes →

Screenshot of changes 1830 to 1837

Note on Verse Divisions and Introductory Material: The Book of Mormon was not divided into verses until the 1879 edition. For consistency and ease of reading, the text from earlier editions has been arranged into verses following the later structure. Additionally, certain content, such as introductory pages, has been omitted from this project to focus on the main scriptural text.

You can find more about me and this project on My Website.

Routes

General Pages

  • /
    Home page with links to each edition, explanations, and links to the changes pages.

  • /about
    About the project

Reading Routes

  • /en/<edition>
    Info on a specific edition (e.g. 1830, 1920, 1981), with links to each book (1 Nephi, Alma, etc) in that edition.

    • example /en/1830

  • /en/<edition>/<book>
    Info on a specific book (e.g. 1-nephi, alma, moroni), with links to each chapter in that book.

    • example /en/1830/1-nephi

  • /en/<edition>/<book>/<chapter>
    Read a specific chapter from a specific edition

    • Example: /en/1830/1-nephi/1

  • /en/<edition>/<book>/<chapter>?showFootnotes=true
    Read a specific chapter from a specific edition with footnotes enabled

  • /en/<edition>/<book>/<chapter>?compare=<editionX>
    Read a specific chapter from a specific edition with inline strikethroughs for removed text from ’edition’ to ’editionX’

  • /en/simultaneous/<book>/<chapter>
    Read a specific chapter from all editions at once.

    • Example: /en/simultaneous/1-nephi/1

Change & Comparison Routes

  • /changes
    Info of basic textual changes between editions. Links to the “all changes” page and changes between each edition

  • /changes/all
    All changes across every edition

  • /changes/<edition>
    Example: /changes/1920 Changes from 1830 → 1920

Technical details

This project uses NextJS for good speed, SEO, and SSG.
Uses @tanstack/react-virtual for fast loading of thousands of changes on the changes routes. I’ll be using diff-match-patch to calculate differences between editions

Development

To run locally:

npm i
npm run dev

Alternatively, this code is deployed on Vercel at https://bom-editions.vercel.app/

Data

  • I’m storing full JSON for each edition. (I realize I could store the baseline 1830 edition and then store diffs for each newer edition, but I don’t think it’s worth the work at this time.)
  • I want to eventually be able to have this work for different languages too, which is why I have an en folder, but for now I will only work on English.
/public/data/
  en/
    1830/
      1-nephi/
        1.json
    1837/
      1-nephi/
        1.json
    1920/
      1-nephi/
        1.json

Example JSON file (/public/data/en/1830/1-nephi/1.json):

{
  "book": "1 Nephi",
  "chapter": 1,
  "edition": "1830",
  "verses": [
    { "verse": 1, "text": "I, Nephi, having been born of good parents..." },
    { "verse": 2, "text": "Yea, I make a record..." }
    ...
  ]
}

The data is from Open Scripture . I’ve included a git submodule and the processing steps in the data-source folder. This repository has the text data of all the editions in a tab separated value file.