Does it make sense to put an individual book index on the web?
Each Rosenfeld Media book has its own web site, and we already make each book’s tables of contents, FAQs, and other materials available. Would there be additional utility in viewing a book’s index? Coming from a background in librarianship, I know that there are a few index fetishists among us who might judge a book by its index (a character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle goes further, judging the indexer’s personality). I imagine one might indeed get a sense of a book’s scope, but unless there is a link to a webified (and, likely, free) version of the book, there’d be no navigational value. (Given that we’re a for-profit, we’d likely link to a way to quickly purchase the relevant title.) Does it make sense to put a collective index of many books on the web? If the term “remote testing” or “Axure” occurred in multiple books, that might be an interesting factoid. Even more interesting—a report of the most frequently-occurring terms (hmmm, this is starting to sound suspiciously like sit
