Special Features of This Book

Table of Contents

This is a very unusual book for reasons beyond its subject matter.

This book was created from standard ascii text files, and formatted by means of a series of Microsoft Word 2000 macros. (The Concept Index required an additional tool, written in Java.)

Because of the heavy use of computer automation in formatting the book, it has a number of special features, including the following:

• There are many cross-references ("see page xxx") throughout the book, relating one section of the book to another.

• Whenever you see a certain symbol appearing in the text, then there's a corresponding entry in the End Notes section at the back of the book. This is usually a reference to another book or research paper.
• The index to the book is a Concept Index. For example, in a discussion of child abuse, chapter 1 contains a reference to Simone de Beauvoir's classic book, The Second Sex. Suppose you're looking for that entry. Since the entire concept is indexed, you can find this quotation by looking up any of the words in the concept -- including Simone, Beauvoir, second, sex, child and abuse -- in the Concept Index. So if you're looking for information about some concept, you can find that information if you can think of just one word in the concept.

Microsoft Word's macro language is incredibly powerful, and permits you to automate a great deal of work. The drawback is that Word's macro processing has many bugs, including a number that hang the system and force a reboot. The worst bugs are in header/footer handling, which has a buggy, clunky implementation.

Nonetheless, the power of the capability saved me an enormous amount of time, even including the time rebooting and recovering from bugs. In fact, there's a lot I could not have done without Microsoft Word's wonderful macro processing.

The fact is, outside of writing the macros, adding all the special features to this book -- cross-references, end notes, concept index -- was neither hard nor time consuming.

The reason I make this point is that any publisher could make a one-time investment in the proper tools, and use them to add a great deal of richness to many types of books. I can imagine such things as tiny asterisks signaling additional information elsewhere, or page numbers in the margins or at the foot of the page for related material.

These enhancements could be used densely in complex technical books or textbooks, or sparingly in such books as novels, to remind a reader the page number where a certain character was first introduced.

In fact, I recently read a technical book which used the cross-referencing feature ("see page xxx") heavily, and it's hard to exaggerate how much of a pleasure it was. Whenever the author referenced an earlier discussion, she always had an adjacent page number reference that made the book much easier, faster and more fun to read.

The ironic thing, of course, is that these are the paper book analog of "hyperlinks" on the internet, or in electronic books. The fact is with very little trouble, we can get many of the advantages of high-tech electronic books within our old low-tech printed books, and publishers should look at ways to do that.