Review of *Index, A History of the* by Dennis Duncan

I found Index through the one news organization I actually pay a subscription for: the Christian Science Monitor. In March, they posted an article about the book that immediately peaked my curiousity. A book about indexes? The thing at the back of my textbooks that lists subjects and tells you the page number? This was the first time I remembered seeing a book review or recommendation from CSM, and the choice of topic was an odd one. So I bought a copy on Google Play and started reading it.

As the title suggests, Index is a history book. It starts from the earliest examples of subject indexing and moves forward in time. It highlights the indexing system of the Library of Alexandria: the Pinakes. It highlights the first time a proper subject index was created, as well as the first instance of its cousin the concordance. It tells of how the chaptering and verses of the Bible contributed to the index, and how to index contributed back. The printing press is, of course, mentioned in its influences. The index's use as a tool of fiction and a tool of politics are included. Google's mighty index is included near the end in a chapter that also draws attention to how fundamentally human and subjective the index is by design.

What feels slightly odd is that it doesn't mention library classification systems as an index after the Library of Alexandria's Pinakes. Aren't Dewey Decimal and LoC both a kind of index? Perhaps one with a pre-defined list of topics, but still a pointer to where a particular subject is located. I assume that Duncan had his reasons for not including them.

The book gave me a lot to think about regarding my personal information management. I've been more sure to mark sources (with page numbers) for my notes. I've also given more thought to tagging and the importance of it. Unfortunately, the book is sparce in details on how to index, but that isn't part of its goal. I'm reminded of my recent reading of Gwern's "Why Do Hipsters Steal Stuff?" and how details of why a particular design exists as it is can be lost overtime as copies are made. In fact, I learned this shortly after when looking at ebook indexes.

As a poor experiment, I had a look at five recent ebooks I had bought: Cult of Smart, Seeing Justice Done, Of Beards and Men, Stuff You Should Know, and Wanting. Stuff You Should Know had no index (though I don't know what I expected from a book spin-off of a podcast). Beards and Justice both had full indexes (though Justice appeared to not have clickable links within the flowable-text version whereas Beards did). Wanting and Cult both had indexes, but they were missing page numbers.

I wouldn't have thought anything of this before reading Index. Almost all eReaders have a search function, after all. But search functions like those are effectively concordances, not indexes. To give an example: Cult of Smart has several sub-entries for "charter schools", including "alternative charter schools", "elimination of", and "neoliberalism". If I search "elimination of charter schools" in Google Play Books' reader, I get zero results. But if I search "elimination" and "charter schools" separately and compare the results, I get one page that appears in both. Yet this is still not the correct answer, because the actual line it found was "from charter schools to the elimination of teacher unions"! The index has been rendered useless!

Both Cult and Wanting feature a note from the publisher pointing out that page numbers were removed in the digial version and that readers should use the search function. Why go through the extra effort to remove the page numbers that are already there? Well, one thing mentioned in Index is that the Amazon ebook format fails to recognize page numbers in favour of 150 byte chunks. So are they just avoiding complaints from Kindle users if the index mentions page numbers that don't exist for them and leaving epub users out to dry? I'm not sure, but I can't think of a better reason to remove work you already paid for. (And interactive links within ebooks are a thing, dammit.**)

I finished Index a week or so ago, but the other day I was at Barnes and Noble and saw a physical copy of the book while waiting in the checkout line. I want to keep physical copies of the best books I find, and this will be the second one after Scout Mindset. It feels important to keep a physical copy, given that one of Duncan's ideas is that the index is a technology of the codex era and not the scroll - and since the digital version offers little more than a concordance depending on your e-Reader. The book jacket is a nice textured plastic, and the cover is beautiful (if bold).