A well-designed index can help facilitate smarter e-books, making it easier for readers to find and retrieve information more efficiently. Unfortunately, at least for the immediate future, indexes won’t likely be appearing in most e-books on the the main e-reading systems, such as Kindle and Nook. The companies behind these reading platforms haven’t programmed their reading software in a way that would make indexes easy – or at least easier – to implement. Amazon comes closest, with the page numbers you now see on some Kindle books appearing courtesy of so-called “page list” data that many publishers provide – essentially lists correlating e-book location with pages in a print book. That data could, in theory, be used to automate the implementation of indexes and to make them more accurate. The indexer needs to move beyond taking a digital snapshot of a print index and turning each entry into a hyperlink. Instead, search tools and indexes need to work in partnership, passing queries from one to the other as different readers arrive with different questions.
In following blog postings, I will explore specific problems with e-book indexes. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com