Why Index an E-Book?
A while ago, I published a Substack post in which I presented an abstract to a recently completed indexing project: “The Selected Works of General Martin E. Dempsey.” It was to be published in print as well as digitally, as an e-book.
That post inspired one of my readers, who has decades of experience as a librarian, to put forth a question that I have received from a large number of people from both academic and non-academic backgrounds:
Why Do E-Books Need Indexes?
By including an index in a (digital) book, significant references to one concept or event will be collocated under one heading, making all relevant information easily findable by readers.
From the Dempsey book, I have a specific example: One of the chapters features an interview where he talks about the 2003 Iraq War but also about lessons learned from the Gulf War in 1990-1991; the Gulf War may be called the Persian Gulf War, the First Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, or the First Iraq War. It may also be referred to by the event that triggered it, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. “Iraq” is only mentioned in one of those names. Another term that appeared in the book was new to me — it was an instance in which General Dempsey referred to the Gulf war as the “96 Hour War.” (I confirmed with the client that the preferred term should be “Gulf War.”)
Another reason why e-books benefit from having indexes is that it is common for people to be mentioned not by name, but by their professional titles or family relations. People who are named on one page but referred to by their titles or relationship to another person (e.g., his brother; the company president) on another page will not be easily tracked down through a Control-F search. Similarly, a subject may be talked about without being explicitly named.
Rather than being very helpful, this a Control-F search has the potential of being overwhelming (and incomplete) when a search for something like “president” or “Jones” retrieves 80 or more hits that must be sifted through, blindly.
In short, there is complexity in writing that sometimes makes it difficult to find all relevant information by doing a simple “Control-F” search.
The information associated with a text’s more ambiguous references to people, places, things, concepts, or events are just raindrops in a sea of words and, without the benefit of an index, are about as easy to locate as a needle in a haystack.
Here’s a link to one of my first blog posts, on the more general topic of why it’s beneficial for books to include indexes.
