Table of Contents in Novels – Do We Need Them?

So, it’s Valentine’s Day (here in Australia, almost over in fact), and no novel yet. Sorry!

Formatting is mostly done. I sent it out to friends and family to proofread, expecting them to find a couple of spelling mistakes, or missing punctuation marks. But of course, they’ve found other issues that I need to fix. Hopefully not long now.

Today though, I wanted to raise a new question. One of the recomendations Amazon makes in their formatting guide is to include a Table of Contents.

On the surface, this recomendation makes sense. In an ebook, a table of contents enables us to jump straight to the chapter we want in a book. In a non-fiction book, they’re essential, and I use them frequently. If you download a book sample, the table of contents can give you an overview of the topics included.

But in a novel?

Usually the table of contents consists of:

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3... and so on.

It doesn’t tell you much about the book at all, except that it contains chapters. (Which hopefully you already guessed.)

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t used the table of contents in a novel once. If I pause reading, and need to get back to where I was, I just open the book and it’s kept it’s place. If I really need to find a certain place again, I can bookmark it.

I checked a few ebooks, and while almost all of the self published ebooks have one (probably because of Amazon’s recomendations), many of the traditionally published ebooks didn’t include one.

So what do you think? Does a table of contents have a place in an novel ebook? Have you ever used one? Do you include one in your ebooks?