Judy.....
Strong opinion. I disagree. I know you come from an education perspective and perhaps that's shaping some of what you are feeling but my experience says:
1. Creating indexes is subjective at best. A great index can help make the contents of a printed work more accessible; a poorly done one (which 90% are) gets in the way because it sets up a false expectation about what is and isn't covered in the book.
2. The ability to full-text-search an eBook almost always more than makes up for the lack of an index. An index necessarily confines itself to the concepts and words the person preparing the index thought were important. The ability to search the text for any word or phrase makes it much more likely that I'll be able to find what *I* am looking for rather than only what the indexer thought to index.
3. Either by design or because of flaws in the way PDFs are generated or displayed, indexes of eBooks generally end up pointing a page number that doesn't match the actual number on the page. Front matter doesn't get separated out. Page x is page 10 and if that's the last Roman numeral page, then page 1 is actually page 11. Again, please note before you respond to this comment that I'm saying that's my experience with the PDFs I've worked with. It may well be that someone who really knows how to manage the PDF-creation process knows how to get around this, but my experience is that most authors don't.
When all is said and done, I'd rather have more material sooner that I can free-text search than less material later that has an index that is almost destined to be only somewhat useful anyway.
In any case, I'd suggest that a blanket, universal mandate that PDFs "must have an index" seems to me to be too broad at a minimum.
Dan
On Feb 25, 2005, at 8:01 PM, Judy Perry wrote:
Not an excuse.
Printed books simply MUST have an index. I really believe that PDFs should too.
Judy
On Fri, 25 Feb 2005, graham samuel wrote:
Well, indices can be written - we might get volunteers to do it. In fact I might be such a volunteer for one or more of the books. Forces you to read the text, I find.
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