Optimal Indexing

E-Book Text-Reflow Problem

Why do the vast majority of e-books today come without indexes?  Primarily, because of implementation challenges.  A reader’s ability to adjust font size plays havoc with page references.  Where, for example, in an e-book should index entries point to?  At certain font sizes, hyperlinked numbers might lead exactly where you want to go.  Or you might have to page ahead – or back – a click or three to find it.  Which direction?  Varying screen sizes will compound matters.

Indexers are familiar with page reflow. That problem is why we warn our clients to make sure the pages they submit for an index are in FINAL form.  This problem is magnified ten times over in e-books.  The reader of an e-book can adjust their font size.  Some readers of e-books like big font; some prefer smaller font.  Now all have many choices of font-size when they use an e-reader device.

Published e-books have a serious text reflow problem.  This problem makes it almost impossible to include hyperlinks to page references that direct the reader to exactly where you want them to go.

I will discuss other problems with e-book indexes in future blog postings.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com

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

Electronic book readers such as the Kindle and the Nook have changed the way people read books. With the electronic book reader, pages are turned electronically and silently, but what happens when the user tries to look up a subject in the index?  The index is static.  It has the same list of subjects and page references as the print version, but requires that the user tediously page through the alphabet to find the subject, then wade through the text to find the referenced page.

The publishing industry has a great opportunity to make indexes dynamic in e-books by adding hyperlinks to index references.  By clicking on an index reference, the reader would be linked to the appropriate section in the book.  Embedded indexing offers this technology, by creating index entries that are inserted electronically into the computer files along with the text of the document.  Instead of creating a separate index file with dedicated indexing software, an embedded index is created in the same software as the rest of the document.

Currently, print documents produced with embedded indexing can be posted online.  When the user clicks on the index entry, the relevant text is displayed because index references have been turned into links.  Adding hyperlinks to index references in e-book indexes would be the next step.

For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com