[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Oh, you are being a [something or other]. You know I do, in fact, read all your stuff. (Go ahead, I defy you to find other human beings that do!). I just don't always remember every single thing. And...well, yes, I may on occasion skim. It's not like you write 300-word Blogger posts, now, is it. You're like the Anti-Twitter.

Originally Posted by Hitch

And there it is. :-) That stuff is just bloody tedious. I think it would be fun to write programming or clips, etc., to do it...but HAVING to do it, commercially, is the dog's south end.

Only had to fix a bajillion of those rotten indexes that someone else created (and that was bad enough!).

If it's a project I'm working on from scratch, I insist on unlinked indexes.

Originally Posted by Ryn

Laura mentioned another script that might actually serve my purpose even better: LiveIndex, found here: https://www.id-extras.com/products/liveindex/

I'm mentioning it, just in case anyone else ever comes across a similar use case.

Nice. I'll add it to my list.

Originally Posted by Ryn

This passive searching allows for a deeper sense of discovery in books that are more encyclopedic in scope.

Not relevant to the vast majority of books that reaches our devices, I would be the first to agree, but in some cases, very much a desirable addition.

Yep. An Index also lets you find more "broad" concepts, not necessarily worded in the raw text itself.

Take this for example:

famous philosophers
	Aquinas, 10
	Aristotle, 1, 5, 60, 199
	Socrates, 20, 60

You might search for the word "philosopher", then have to sift through 100 (irrelevant) "philosopher" hits. And within the text, "Aquinas", "Aristotle", or "Socrates" might not appear near the word "philosopher" at all.

Search (in ebooks) also doesn't typically match related words like: "philosophy" or "philosophies" or "philosophical".

A good Indexer would be able to pre-categorize + organize the information, throwing out a lot of the "irrelevant hits", while at the same time combining all those "related words" together.

And as Hitch said, you could use the index to get a very broad overview of WHAT information is covered in a given book. Even the size of the entries can tell you how "important" an author thinks a topic is. For example, the author may consider Aristotle to be more important than Aquinas (4 vs. 1).

Note: Me + Hitch (and others) discussed the pros/cons of Indexes/Search at extreme length in the 2016 "Sick of Amazon Kindle books without Page Numbers" thread.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Quite debatable whether electronic search engine = print concordance. I would argue that the ability to search the entire text of a work has no print-based counterpart. But the ability to search a book's text certainly replaces the necessity for either a concordance or an index, in my opinion (and in my experience, since I've never once looked at, clicked on, or otherwise engaged with an electronic index or concordance). That's why searching is such a game changer in the P2E medium shift.

Around the time of that famous 2016 thread, I read "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler.

Absolutely fantastic title. When I first heard of it, I thought:

"Who the heck doesn't know how to read a book?"

Well, I didn't know... I didn't know... And it completely changed the way I read Non-Fiction + view Indexes.

Here's one blog article also discussing the book:

"How to Read a Book: The Ultimate Guide by Mortimer Adler"

* * *

And here's a relevant excerpt of Chapter 4, "The Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading":

Spoiler:

Inspectional Reading I: Systematic Skimming or Pre-reading

Let us return to the basic situation to which we have referred before. There is a book or other reading matter, and here is your mind. What is the first thing that you do?

[...] First, you do not know whether you want to read the book. You do not know whether it deserves an analytical reading. But you suspect that it does, or at least that it contains both information and insights that would be valuable to you if you could dig them out.

Second, let us assume-and this is very often the case*that you have only a limited time in which to find all this out.

In this case, what you must do is skim the book, or, as some prefer to say, pre-read it. Skimming or pre-reading is the first sublevel of inspectional reading. Your main aim is to discover whether the book requires a more careful reading. Secondly, skimming can tell you lots of other things about the book, even if you decide not to read it again with more care.

Giving a book this kind of quick once-over is a threshing process that helps you to separate the chaff from the real kernels of nourishment. You may discover that what you get from skimming is all the book is worth to you for the time being. It may never be worth more. But you will know at least what the author's main contention is, as well as what kind of book he has written, so the time you have spent looking through the book will not have been wasted.

[...]

2. STUDY THE TABLE OF CONTENTS to obtain a general sense of the book's structure; use it as you would a road map before taking a trip. It is astonishing how many people never even glance at a book's table of contents unless they wish to look something up in it. In fact, many authors spend a considerable amount of time in creating the table of contents, and it is sad, to think their efforts are often wasted.

It used to be a common practice, especially in expository works, but sometimes even in novels and poems, to write very full tables of contents, with the chapters or parts broken down into many subtitles indicative of the topics covered. Milton, for example, wrote more or less lengthy headings, or "Arguments," as he called them, for each book of Paradise Lost. Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with an extensive analytical table of contents for each chapter. Such summaries are no longer common, although occasionally you do still come across an analytical table of contents. One reason for the decline of the practice may be that people are not so likely to read tables of contents as they once were. Also, publishers have come to feel that a less revealing table of contents is more seductive than a completely frank and open one. Readers, they feel, will be attracted to a book with more or less mysterious chapter titles-they will want to read the book to find out what the chapters are about. Even so, a table of contents can be valuable, and you should read it carefully before going on to the rest of the book.

[...]

3. CHECK THE INDEX if the book has one-most expository works do. Make a quick estimate of the range of topics covered and of the kinds of books and authors referred to. When you see terms listed that seem crucial, look up at least some of the passages cited. (We will have much more to say about crucial terms in Part Two. Here you must make your judgment of their importance on the basis of your general sense of the book, as obtained from steps 1 and 2.) The passages you read may contain the crux-the point on which the book hinges-or the new departure which is the key to the author's approach and attitude.

As in the case of the table of contents, you might at this point check the index of this book. You will recognize as crucial some terms that have already been discussed. Can you identify, for example, by the number of references under them, any others that also seem important?

Even just skimming an Index (or well-designed Table of Contents) can give you lots of helpful information.

This is why I mostly don't mind leaving unlinked indexes in ebooks (they don't hurt, and can only help, even in ways that pure search can't accomplish).