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what I don't understand is why all these "Preview" options only show the cover, table of contents, and back cover.

why not show a few pages from the actual content? isn't that fair use?

To my knowledge, every preview includes at minimum the basic front-matter (such as those you describe). There are other mechanisms in place which enable specific controlled use cases e.g. limited page previews for folks coming from Wikipedia citations. I don't know if Open Library is presently taking taking advantage of these enriched previews -- I'll check with our product team to see what improvements to the experience may be possible.

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