Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
One could well argue that an index is redundant in an eBook. One uses the "Search" facility of one's reader in its place.
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That only works if the referenced passages contain the exact same words/phrasing as the indexed item, which is not always the case, especially when it comes to stuff in biographies like, say:
World War I 69, 70, 74, 105
* Andrews as a spy during, 71-76, 208
to give an example from a palaeontological biography book I have right next to me.
Nowhere on page 208 does the word "spy" appear, though the passage is about his reports submitted to the US War Department gathered re: Mongolia's economy, transportation, military capability, etc. And the longer passage from pg 71-76 seem to mostly call them "intelligence missions", and avoid the actual use of the word "spying", as far as I can tell from a quick skim.
So if you don't already know exactly what terms you're looking for, search may turn out to be less than helpful when turning up results you know should be there.
And common words can really give a lot of extraneous results.