[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by foosion

I'm not convinced an index is useful in an ebook. I'm not seeing anything that makes it more useful than word search. Seeing how many entries there are? You can search. Not sure of a word that has variants? Search for a stem.

More detailed explanations are given in those threads...

But here's just a few.

- - -

Take this Index:

famous philosophers
   Aristotle, 1, 5 
   Aquinas, Thomas, 10
   Socrates, 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, 225, 250
Teapot, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10

1. Indexes can capture broader terms that may not ever show up directly in the book.

A simple search for:

• famous
• philosophy

may get you 0 hits... or the exact opposite—thousands of irrelevant hits you have to sift through:

• "Socrates" is mentioned 100 times throughout the book (in passing, maybe in a quote), but only 10 of those are important.
• "philosophy" only has 2 hits, but "philosopher" has 100.

2. If you're reading this book for the first time, you may never even have the idea to search for "Aquinas".

Or maybe you know the guy as "Thomas Aquinas", but only his last name shows up in the actual text.

3. Based on size of entries, you can quickly gather importance of certain terms/topics.

For example:

• "Socrates must be a super important guy! He has 10 entries!"
• "Aquinas only has 1."
• "Teapot has 5!!!"
  
  • "This guy must love his tea!"

The author thinks Socrates is extra important, because his entry is huge, so "I better pay extra attention any time he gets mentioned!"

- - -

Skimming the Index is a key skill + very helpful for research too. (The information density is huge!)

And once you "prep your mind" for what's coming up, you can more effectively absorb this information too.

- - -

Side Note on Points 1/2 (Search for Exact Terms): This can also happen for abbreviations/titles...

The book I'm currently working on uses a ton of "Amb." (It took a while until my brain even adjusted to understand that as short for "Ambassador".)

Here's just a few of the hits:

• Amb. Chas Freeman
  
  • first + last name
• Amb. Matlock
  
  • last name only
• Former Amb. Zimmermann
  
  • prefix + last name
• Canadian Amb. Bissett
  
  • country + last name

and then you have:

• 74 Ambassador
  
  • The person's official title.
• 63 ambassador
  
  • Generic/Mentioned in passing.
• 36 Amb.
  
  • Shortened abbreviation.
• 1 Ambassador-at-Large

and then you have a bunch of:

• 22 Freeman

which could be:

1. "Chas Freeman", the ambassador.
2. Multiple other people/authors with the same last name!
3. Organizations with "Freeman" in the name!

An Index would have all this stuff minimized to "the important ambassadors" (a super-condensed list).

While raw search would have you sifting through at least 2 sets of terms + 200 hits... just for "ambassador"s!

- - -

Like I said above, it doesn't hurt to leave an Index in. It can only help.