index fingered

The biographer Gary O'Connor told me one possible trick of indexing: don't provide one. That way researchers who want to filch a part of the whole thing have to buy a copy, and reviewers are forced to read the book.

I've just shipped off my own day's work of index revisions on Suffer & Survive - largely additions. As a shallow-pocketed researcher myself, I've enjoyed the likes of Amazon's 'search-inside' features. These have alerted me to books I would never have found otherwise, especially American editions, and I've cited and made use of a number of them. Have I bought them? Seldom. The ability to leaf through a few pages of a book generally does it for me, and supplies my immediate need. Though you can only search a few pages at a time, patience lets me come in and out enough. The one thing I can't do is print those pages, so it's a matter of wielding a pencil on paper.

The books I've bought? The ones that promise me so much information that copying doesn't appeal, and I see I want the whole book. Hence the worth, to me, of having a fulsome index. These index pages are also searchable online. I've aimed to make page listings extensive enough to encourage browsers to buy.