5 ms·

The radical power of the book index

71 points by diodorus 5y ago

allenleein 5y ago
Compare the popularity of podcasts, tweets, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, to blogs and books, to see how rare genuine readers are.
- marvindanig 5y ago
  You are comparing on-the-web text and conversations with downloaded longform artifacts (files) that do not register read events like the other smaller resources. According to some purists, books have not even happened on the web yet, and one could argue that a book and a file are not the same products to begin with. First principles and all that.
chrismorgan 5y ago
> And if we hadn’t quite got the message, her entry for “bad indexes” tells us to “see also automated indexing.” Go to “automated indexing,” and the two subheadings read “attempts to index like a human 254” and “fails 304–7.” And yet people keep doing it even though it produces an inferior result. “Cost,” you might say, “is reduced by using a computer, and the result good enough that we can get away with it.” And this is true of many fields where computers have taken over but do a worse job, such as music engraving (compare the old masters to the default or even moderately tuned output of just about anything other than Lilypond and there’s a huge difference if you’re a player; Lilypond, being deliberately designed to do better, does better, though it still needs some skill to produce truly excellent results) and typesetting of Bibles (readily observable in print if you’re looking for it and compare Bibles over time; and glaringly obvious in Bible software, which is uniformly awful for reading, a problem which I’m working on). It’s not limited to tech, either; in book-binding, for example, hot-melt glue is faster and significantly easier for manufacture, and so in mass production has entirely supplanted cold glue, despite producing a vastly inferior result. Does this justify a wistful yearning for the days of old when hearts were twice as good as gold and twenty times as mellow? People on this site are more aware than most of the ubiquity through time of this sentiment. But perhaps this time it’s different? I wonder how many sombre reflectors have thought that. Certainly it’s not new phenomenon for progress to be tempered by inferiority in some regards; further back in history, crossbows successfully replaced longbows, again because of a significantly reduced time to production despite inferior results—but not so inferior as to be useless. Progress is littered with such compromises. Often those compromises are eventually conquered, too: after another couple of centuries, they could make crossbows more powerful than longbows had been.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  If you haven't read it yet, check out Ben Bova's novel "Cyberbooks." no one cares about bookbinding so its always a treat to see it mentioned.
jrochkind1 5y ago
The book index can do some things that full text search can't do, it's true. But full-text search can also do a great many things the "back of the book" style index can't do, especially when quality of back-of-the-book indexes varies highly (generally correlated to how much you could spend on paying skilled expert(s) to create them, and always has; it's just that publishers used to invest more in them, at least sometimes). If you could only have full-text-search or back-of-the-book index, which would you pick? It doesn't matter, cause you don't have a choice. I disagree with article that it "doesn't need saving", if the author meant that it's future is secure. The back-of-the-book index is dying, those that remain are seldom of much quality. The expertise and skill and methodologies of creating manual indexes will soon be lost. I am glad some are trying to document the back-of-the-book index as a technology, before it's gone.
- marvindanig 5y ago
  There are some things that both a book index and even full text search cannot solve. For example, if the teacher asks why in the Pride and Prejudice does Elizabeth lose temper on Mr. Darcy?, those smart-on-the-surface solutions can't take you anywhere. On the other hand my friend from the other school can easily tell me to go to page number 432 on the book to find the exact answer because labeled pagination has reference accessibility [1] along with random access. [1] https://bubblin.io/blog/referential-accessibility https://bubblin.io/blog/referential-accessibility
  - saimiam 5y ago
    Do works of fiction have indexes? They may have a table of contents with each chapter name sort of indexing into events in the book - in which case you’d look for a chapter whose name hints at Elizabeth getting angry with mr. D’arcy. Indexes are more suited for facts and figured.
    - twic 5y ago
      Some do, Pale Fire probably being the most notable: https://www.theindexer.org/files/20-4/20-4_209.pdf https://www.theindexer.org/files/20-4/20-4_209.pdf
yesenadam 5y ago
I found this awesome Samuel Johnson index in an 1887 edition of Boswell: http://www.adamponting.com/sayings-of-johnson/ http://www.adamponting.com/sayings-of-johnson/
tconfrey 5y ago
I see parallels with the evolution of finding things online. Originally Yahoo went with a human curated nested categories approach - essentially an index of web pages. It was supplanted by AltaVista (and later Google) because automated search was just so much more efficient. OTOH I think a lot of the new Personal Knowledge Management tools could be seen as helping you build your own index of the stuff you want to keep track of.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dukeofdoom 5y ago
I wish this was done for youtube videos. Show me a graphic of the scene changes. And let me click into them. So many talking head videos with the promise of something towards the end of the video, or sometimes even something that is never deliver. Great, you redid your backyard into a paradise. Let me see it, and I'll be the judge of that. I don't want to fast forward for 30 seconds over half hour of talking. Don't waste my time.

71 points by diodorus 5y ago

Compare the popularity of podcasts, tweets, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, to blogs and books, to see how rare genuine readers are.

marvindanig 5y ago
You are comparing on-the-web text and conversations with downloaded longform artifacts (files) that do not register read events like the other smaller resources. According to some purists, books have not even happened on the web yet, and one could argue that a book and a file are not the same products to begin with. First principles and all that.

chrismorgan 5y ago

> And if we hadn’t quite got the message, her entry for “bad indexes” tells us to “see also automated indexing.” Go to “automated indexing,” and the two subheadings read “attempts to index like a human 254” and “fails 304–7.” And yet people keep doing it even though it produces an inferior result. “Cost,” you might say, “is reduced by using a computer, and the result good enough that we can get away with it.” And this is true of many fields where computers have taken over but do a worse job, such as music engraving (compare the old masters to the default or even moderately tuned output of just about anything other than Lilypond and there’s a huge difference if you’re a player; Lilypond, being deliberately designed to do better, does better, though it still needs some skill to produce truly excellent results) and typesetting of Bibles (readily observable in print if you’re looking for it and compare Bibles over time; and glaringly obvious in Bible software, which is uniformly awful for reading, a problem which I’m working on). It’s not limited to tech, either; in book-binding, for example, hot-melt glue is faster and significantly easier for manufacture, and so in mass production has entirely supplanted cold glue, despite producing a vastly inferior result. Does this justify a wistful yearning for the days of old when hearts were twice as good as gold and twenty times as mellow? People on this site are more aware than most of the ubiquity through time of this sentiment. But perhaps this time it’s different? I wonder how many sombre reflectors have thought that. Certainly it’s not new phenomenon for progress to be tempered by inferiority in some regards; further back in history, crossbows successfully replaced longbows, again because of a significantly reduced time to production despite inferior results—but not so inferior as to be useless. Progress is littered with such compromises. Often those compromises are eventually conquered, too: after another couple of centuries, they could make crossbows more powerful than longbows had been.

h2odragon 5y ago
If you haven't read it yet, check out Ben Bova's novel "Cyberbooks." no one cares about bookbinding so its always a treat to see it mentioned.

jrochkind1 5y ago

The book index can do some things that full text search can't do, it's true. But full-text search can also do a great many things the "back of the book" style index can't do, especially when quality of back-of-the-book indexes varies highly (generally correlated to how much you could spend on paying skilled expert(s) to create them, and always has; it's just that publishers used to invest more in them, at least sometimes). If you could only have full-text-search or back-of-the-book index, which would you pick? It doesn't matter, cause you don't have a choice. I disagree with article that it "doesn't need saving", if the author meant that it's future is secure. The back-of-the-book index is dying, those that remain are seldom of much quality. The expertise and skill and methodologies of creating manual indexes will soon be lost. I am glad some are trying to document the back-of-the-book index as a technology, before it's gone.

marvindanig 5y ago
There are some things that both a book index and even full text search cannot solve. For example, if the teacher asks why in the Pride and Prejudice does Elizabeth lose temper on Mr. Darcy?, those smart-on-the-surface solutions can't take you anywhere. On the other hand my friend from the other school can easily tell me to go to page number 432 on the book to find the exact answer because labeled pagination has reference accessibility [1] along with random access. [1] https://bubblin.io/blog/referential-accessibility https://bubblin.io/blog/referential-accessibility
- saimiam 5y ago
  Do works of fiction have indexes? They may have a table of contents with each chapter name sort of indexing into events in the book - in which case you’d look for a chapter whose name hints at Elizabeth getting angry with mr. D’arcy. Indexes are more suited for facts and figured.
  - twic 5y ago
    Some do, Pale Fire probably being the most notable: https://www.theindexer.org/files/20-4/20-4_209.pdf https://www.theindexer.org/files/20-4/20-4_209.pdf

yesenadam 5y ago

I found this awesome Samuel Johnson index in an 1887 edition of Boswell: http://www.adamponting.com/sayings-of-johnson/ http://www.adamponting.com/sayings-of-johnson/

tconfrey 5y ago

I see parallels with the evolution of finding things online. Originally Yahoo went with a human curated nested categories approach - essentially an index of web pages. It was supplanted by AltaVista (and later Google) because automated search was just so much more efficient. OTOH I think a lot of the new Personal Knowledge Management tools could be seen as helping you build your own index of the stuff you want to keep track of.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dukeofdoom 5y ago

I wish this was done for youtube videos. Show me a graphic of the scene changes. And let me click into them. So many talking head videos with the promise of something towards the end of the video, or sometimes even something that is never deliver. Great, you redid your backyard into a paradise. Let me see it, and I'll be the judge of that. I don't want to fast forward for 30 seconds over half hour of talking. Don't waste my time.