The kindle app for the mac (or pc, or ios device is free). You can download a sample before buying. Or if you don't want to deal with the minor hassle of registering your app with amazon, and don't need privacy, I suppose you can name the book, and I'll check out a sample for you.
(There are books, particularly books with long introductions, that cut off before the main text. Really quite unwelcome in the case of academic books, but what can you do? Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions even includes the advice
"Great books are rare. This is one. Read it and you will see. Skip this introduction. Come back to it if you want to know how the book came into being half a century ago, what its impact was, and the disputes that raged around its theses. Come back if you want one experienced opinion of the status of the book today."
and cuts off three paragraphs into one of the introductions.)