Re: Indexing

> Missing Entry: Whither The Ebook Index?

That definitely rung a chord with me. 

I don't know whether the Kindle application for the iPod Touch is representative of the Kindle itself, but I own a purchased eBook, "The Handbook of Fixed Income Securities," by Fabrozzi & al, that illustrates the problem. This is a dense, long, serious tome; the print edition lists for $135 and is 1500 pages long. You bet it needs an index. Amazing as it may seem, what they have done is to blindly convert the text of the index entries, which appear at the end of the text. There are no hyperlinks. There are no page numbers--not to the print page numbers, not to the Kindle "location" numbers. 

One of my pet peeves is nonfiction PRINT books without an adequate index. The writer of the article is not a disinterested observer, but as a simple book user myself I can endorse what he says. And I'd add, because this is an increasing problem, that making a decent index is very much a manual activity requiring human intervention, because, as he suggests, indexes index concepts, not word occurrences. It drive me bananas when people think an automated computer program can do an adequate job. You see the results every day--you want to look up "foithboinder" you get an entry like "Foithboinder: 23, 25, 31, 32, 40, 51, 52, 68," and on and on for two dozen entries, no indication where the main discussion is or what contexts the word appears in... and you might as well flip through the whole bo
 ok as page to each page number. It takes a human to read the book, understand and organize the concepts, and guess which pages are the important ones.

Worse yet is the nonfiction book with a so-called "index" that is only an index of people named in the book.

(As a side note, I, personally, would love it if longer and more complex _novels_ had indexes as well. There are many times when I've slightly lost the thread of a long, complicated novel, and would love to be able to go to the place where a character makes his first appearance or the detective discovers some particular clue).

Ages ago I read a book entitled "Indexing, The Art Of" by G. Norman Knight, which is well worth reading.



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