ABSTRACT
A book index (Latin, from indicare, “to indicate”) is a collection of significant words with page numbers as pointers to the location of those terms in the text. Likewise, our index finger is the pointer used to indicate the location of objects. A common misconception among some ebook enthusiasts is that the book index has been made obsolete by fast search features. In a typical ebook search, the user enters a term, and the computer scans the text until it encounters the first occurrence of the term. Each time the user presses the search button, the computer moves instantly to the next occurrence of the term. These searches are conducted without the benefit of an electronic index. When it is so easy and fast to do word or phrase searches, why would anyone want to build a book index?
