Do you still use a book index?

They are costly and time-consuming to prepare, and take up valuable pages in a print version.

Almost all books come with indexes in the back. These sections identify the most frequently-used words in the book, and list the pages those words appear on. Authors (generally) do not create these indexes. And the creation of an index cannot be fully automated. A person (known as an indexer) manually performs key searches. Then, the indexer decides how best to categorize groupings and variants of words. The process is time-consuming. Often, authors disagree with this categorization, which creates delays and friction. And if any edits are made to the book, the pagination changes, and the index has to be revised. The process is also expensive. Publishers will usually not pay for an index. Rather, authors have to pay for it--usually by drawing on future royalties. Finally, the indexes take up valuable pages. Generally, the longer a book is, the more it costs to print. For example, the index for our casebook is nearly 30 pages.

I wonder whether an index is still a valuable asset for a book--especially a casebook. Do you still use book indexes? I am not a good person to ask, because I only use electronic books. It takes a few seconds to search a book for the precise word I'm looking for. I can't think of any circumstance where I would actually thumb through an index. And let me ask one more variant of the question. Our casebook is sold with access to a free online version, which gives you a full-text-search. Do law students, with access to an ebook, still flip through the index of a casebook? I would think the Table of Contents, which sorts the cases by theme, is sufficient. Would anyone really jump to the index and look up the word "commerce" or "equal protection," for example?

If anyone wishes to opine, please email me.

Update: Readers really, really like indexes.

Comments

[Queen Amalthea]

I use it quite frequently.

[Syd Henderson]

Same here.

[Dan Schiavetta]

How can you not use an index if it's not a searchable digital document?

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

An eBook which can be searched has no need for an index.

I usually use a paper book's index several times, of course depending on the type of book.

[DaivdBehar]

Book? What is this thing you call, book?

[KHP54]

Not so! Perusing the index shows you the important words in the work, without you having to guess them.

[LawTalkingGuy]

Yes, but never for casebooks or legal treatises. I’ve noticed that legal books index things really weird. They’ll take really broad topics and put the key phrases and terms under them and you might not think to look there immediately. Like if I see a term of art or something somewhere and I want to know if it’s referenced in a book it’s not always easy to find in the index without jumping all over the place to guess what topic it might be under.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Legal books do index things really weird. It's better to think of a case dealing with that topic and go to the case index.

[LawTalkingGuy]

Usually I am looking at books because I want to know where to start with my case research.

[LawTalkingGuy]

Usually I am looking at books because I want to know where to start with my case research.

[JimM47]

For books in general, I do not often use the index. But if I find myself looking at a casebook, I am using the index every time.

[LawTalkingGuy]

Also useless: separate tables of cases and statutory sections. They really have no meaning outside the context of a sentence. It’s just a series of numbers and names. This is unlike a bibliography, which is also a list of sources, but has authors and titles that tell you what the thing is about.

[Seamus]

I disagree. If I'm reading a casebook or a treatise, I often want to go straight to where a particular case is discussed.

[Kristian H.]

Hardcopy, absolutely.

Less so in e-book, but for some subjects I do. I do use e-book ToC and index in if it links to the reference, rather than just lists the reference. Otherwise they are mostly useless.

[TTT]

IANAL so I can't comment on case books. I will use an index when I recall reading something in a book awhile back and can not remember what section it was in.

[jimc5499]

It depends on the book. I use quite a few engineering books in my work. If the book has a good Table of Contents then the index really doesn't matter. If it doesn't then the index is important. I'm usually looking for a property or formula and don't have the time to go through page by page. Many of these books have no e-book version.

I will say that the Machinery's Handbook e-book version is fantastic. Most of the equations in it can be used from within the book by just plugging in the information. It is also nice to be able to put the specifications for a non-standard thread or gear into the drawing itself.

I have no financial interest in Machinery's Handbook.

[Don Nico]

"If the book has a good Table of Contents then the index really doesn’t matter. "
Excellent point. A through, carefully prepared ToC is extremely valuable but it is not a substitute for an index or a concordance.

[Levin]

I use indexes all the time, even sometimes with electronic books. Some indexes are better than others, and the author should not let a poor indexer impair the work.

[bernard11]

I use the index all the time.

IANAL, so can't speak to a casebook, but in my ordinary reading I often find the index useful.

For example, maybe a book refers to some individual who hasn't been mentioned in a while. Looking him up in the index helps me recall who he is, etc.

[Dick King]

I find scanning an index useful. It tells me what concepts the author considered to be important enough to index.

-dk

[Pettifogger]

I use indicies in law books (I don't use casebooks in the law school sense), but I am old. As a measure of my age, a while back I asked a young lawyer to check a term for me in "Words and Phrases." He had no idea what I was talking about.

[Orbital Mechanic]

A lot of people don't realize how hard it is to come up with a really good index. It is one of those tricky problems that no software does very well (although better than they used to).

However, I read more PDF files than books these days, and I find that I try a search function more often before looking for the index if it has one.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The advantage of an index when not familiar with the subject is that it defines the terms (and hence concepts) in the way that the profession does, and not the way you would.

[Don Nico]

My publisher insists that an index be prepared. If it is carefully done it is far superior to doing word searches in e-books.

[KenveeB]

I don't use one in casebooks. Looking at the table of contents is usually enough for me to find what I'm looking for. I use it regularly in codebooks so I can quickly find the relevant statutes.

[MatthewSlyfield]

Who uses actual paper books anymore?

[LawTalkingGuy]

Do you mean "use" as it relates to the professional practice of law or "use" in the general sense?

[MatthewSlyfield]

Either/both

[Bill Poser]

In printed books I find indices very useful. I also don't think that they are all that difficult to create if authors use the facilities provided by current word-processing software. In searchable electronic documents indices are less important but nonetheless may be useful. Searches of text are indiscriminate - they find every instance of a word. An index can limit itself to the important cases, e.g. where a term is defined or introduced, where it is the topic of a piece of text and not incidental, and so forth.

[Lee Moore]

Depends on the book.

At present I happen to be reading "Solving Enigma's Secrets" which is a modern, truncated and edited, version of three related official reports written in 1945/46 by the codebreakers themselves. So the target audience for the current version is the paying bookbuyer.

But the material the current editor is playing with is fairly technical in parts, and presumably intended for postwar intelligence officials - ie not themselves mathematicians and codebreakers, but reasonably intelligent civil servants hoping to shape policy decisions about signals intelligence.

So you can canter along at normal reading pace for a few pages, until you hit a page that takes a few hours to understand. It's technical but not ludicrously so.

It's about 500 pages, including a 40 page glossary, and a 20 page index. Know what "blist", "cilli", "Elephant Book", Herivelismus", and "Wahlwort" mean ? No ? You're going to need the glossary.

The index I use less, but it's still useful if I need to refer back to something I read earlier in the book, which it turns out I didn't understand as well as I thought I did.

From the perspective of a lawyer trying to understand some aspect of law that he/she/it is not familiar with, I would have thought a index would be helpful for the same reason. But as Levin says - a good index is a lot more useful than a bad one. Little point in clogging up your book with a bad index.

[Lee Moore]

For those who are interested my favorite of those glossary words is "Herivelismus" named after John Herivel, who came up with a brilliant bit of psychology.

1. Each day, the German signalman had to set the Enigma machine up with its daily key. Which included picking three wheels from five, and slotting them on the spindle the right order, and clipping the ring attached to each wheel to one of twenty six different positions. One thing the codebreakers had to work out each day for each key was the position of these ring clips. And there were 26 x 26 x 26 = 17,576 possibilities.

2. Herivel guessed that if the German signalman slotted the wheel spindle with its correct wheels in to the machine as the first step, before he clipped the rings in the right place (rather than doing the ring clips before slotting the wheels on the spindle) then the rings after being clipped would be at the top of the machine at, or close to, the position showing in the window when the machine was shut and ready for use.

3. This was because once the wheels were in, you couldn't physically get at most of the ring positions. You could only get to the positions near the top of the wheel. So you'd put the wheels in, and then spin them till the right positions to clip them were uppermost and accessible.

[Lee Moore]

4. Then to send each message, the German signalman was required to spin each wheel to a random starting position - say ABC. And then think of another random starting position say XYZ, and then encrypt XYZ using the ABC starting position, which say came out at PJW. Then in the message header he'd put ABC PJW in plain text, visible to the world. The guy at the far end would set his machine to ABC type in PJW and out would come XYZ, so he would know where to start the wheels for the real message.

5. Herivel's next guess was that some German signalmen would be too lazy to spin the wheels before picking the ABC starting position. They'd just leave the wheels as they were, and use whatever happened to be showing as the ABC starter position.

6. So that if the German signalman did this lazy move ON THE FIRST MESSAGE OF THE DAY, then the fact that he was not moving the wheels before coming up with ABC, but just using whatever was showing in the window when he'd finished clipping the rings. would mean the Bletchley Park could guess the ring clip positions simply from reading the ABC part of the heading.

7. His psychological guesses proved to be correct, and although the ABC was not always exactly the right answer it sometimes was, and was often close. So by checking the ABC of different German signalmen, on their first message of the day, Bletchley Park could often bring the 17,576 possibilities down to half a dozen.

[Old Smokin' Egg]

I often turn to the index when I'm reading a dead-tree book, which is the majority of my reading.

Especially when reading history, a string search would probably be less useful than a well-constructed index. Suppose, for instance, that I'm reading a history of the U.S. Civil War, and want to find references to Albert Sidney Johnston. The problem is that most of those references will use the surname alone, so I'd have to find them by searching for "Johnston". But that won't distinguish Albert Sidney from Joseph Ewell Johnston. A good index will keep the two separate, and will tell me the pages on which I can find ASJ as opposed to JEJ.

Furthermore, can I limit the string search to single words (ideally, capitalized vs. uncapitalized)? Otherwise, if I'm searching for Grant, I'll also get land grants, and occurrences of "grant" as a verb; if I'm looking for Lee, I'd better hope that nobody's gleeful, and that Admiral Farragut doesn't put his helm alee. To say nothing of E. O. C. Ord—when I look for his last name, will I get every occurrence of all the forms of "order"?

[LawTalkingGuy]

This made me think of another key feature of indexes that text searches won't necessarily have: they're useful for when you don't exactly remember the specific name or term you are looking for and need your memory jogged. To use the Civil War example, you may vaguely remember the Union Quartermaster General started with an "M" then you look in the index and you remember as soon as you see "Meigs, Montgomery."

[Dilan Esper]

Getting rid of indexes will get rid of the practice known as the "Washington Read"- picking up a book, looking at the index to see if you are in it, and then putting it down.

[LawTalkingGuy]

Haha I've never heard that one before.

[Dilan Esper]

It actually made the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/us/washington-books-bring-out-index-fingers.html

[Lee Moore]

But what if the author has called you by your office nickname of "Smelly Old Groper" and put that in the index ?

[KHP54]

Also, what's this complaint about repagination? Surely nobody these days, not even the worst indexer in the world, compiles an index by manual methods!

[David Brayton]

An index for a casebook? In my 20+ years of practice, I've never used a casebook for research (apologies to all the casebook authors). And I don't remember ever referring to a casebook index whilst in school.

A hornbook benefits from an index. But, I always start with the Table of Contents. A detailed ToC is quite helpful.

I've created Indexes and I'm not surprised that publishers charge more to create them. It's not nearly as easy as one might think at first blush.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

"These sections identify the most frequently-used words in the book, and list the pages those words appear on."

We might be reading different books. I rarely see "and," "the," "or," "a," "but," "for," and the like indexed.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Also, this.

[Roger S]

"If anyone wishes to opine, please email me."

I was going to comment here, but apparently you do not read the comments!

[Cal Cetín]

Indexes (indices?) are great if done properly.