Status Updates From Index, A History of the: A ...

Just as I suspected—professional indexers have to read the entire book. It's one of the reasons nonfiction books cost more than novels.

Indexes became more widespread during the early days of printing, but there was anxiety that people would read just the index, and not bother with the book, making us all less intelligent. As Duncan points out, though, Socrates thought writing would lead to people no longer using their memories much, which would make us all less intelligent. So, these fears of new technology are nothing new.

Parchment tags used to label and identify papyrus scrolls in the ancient Mediterranean were called sillybos in Greek, and indices in Latin; hence, syllabus and index, two words used to describe contents. My etymology for the day.