Offshoring

Since the 1990s, decreasing communication costs, combined with shameful wage disparities, have made offshoring hard to resist by U.S. publishing companies.

Kevin Broccoli, a small-biz indexer like me, wrote this today in an article for Upmarket.

You might think, “well it’s much cheaper, and it’s good enough.” But if cheaper and good enough are all you care about, you’re putting yourself at the bottom of the barrel. Is that where you want to be scraped from? It’s true, being cheaper is one way to compete, but the other is being better. Better at creating remarkable, superior work that makes your products or services stand out from the others.

Kevin also discusses the phenomenon of U.S publishers contracting to offshore companies who, in turn, subcontract back to U.S. small businesses.  You’re right. It’s pure craziness.  Read the rest of Kevin’s article here.

Do you love a book so much you want everyone to read it?

Yes, you say?

Then you should know about World Book Night.  When it launched last year, people like us gave away a million books to poor kids and adults. The goal of World Book Night is to put a book into someone’s hands and say, “This one is amazing. You have to read it.”  The goal is to spread the joy of reading.

World Book Night will select 50,000 volunteer book-givers to hand out 20 copies of special edition World Book Night books (a total of a million books altogether).  I MUST be one of those volunteers!  To become one, I have to stop indexing, stop blogging, and try to get selected.

I wonder if I can write eloquently enough about my three favorites.

See also

• The celebration designed to spread a love of reading
• Twenty books in 20 minutes

Bob Dylan loves indexers

♪♫ She looked so immaculately frightful
As she bummed a cigarette ♫ 
Then she went off sniffing drainpipes ♪♪♪

And reciting the alphabet ♫

(From Desolation Row.)

Short and sweet

Brief + clear + complete = concise.

Concise index entries are short and sweet; i.e, brief, clear, and complete.  Tricky, since completeness almost always gets in the way of brevity.  Nonetheless, conciseness is a sine qua non of skilled indexers.

Index, WA 98256

A woman named Persis Gunn thought the mountain nearby looked like a finger pointing toward heaven.  So she christened the place, “Index.”

Home to the SqWuqWu’b3sh (People of the River) before Persis and other Europeans arrived around 1850 to mine the mountains and log the forests, the sleepy town of Index, WA is in the foothills of the Cascades, an hour from Seattle.

Read more about the story of the town named Index here.

2012: Ten predictions for the publishing industry

An index to the Talmud by a NYC attorney

The Talmud is 63 volumes of rabbinical discourse.  “For the life of me,” Daniel Retter said, “I could not understand why the Talmud did not have an index.”

Mr. Retter’s newly published comprehensive alphabetical index, which took seven years to complete, now points readers to laws, parables, commentaries, and sages like Hillel and Shamai.  Its 6600 main headings; 27,000 subentries; and 42,000 references cost $29.99.

Read more in the NYT story about the index.

Malinowski, Bronislaw

What’s a Father of Social Anthropology to do?!  There is hardly enough time to stay up to date on the study of how people behave in their natural settings.  According to Neil Postman, Bronislaw Malinowski’s, the Father of Social Anthropology’s, method for determining if a newly published work deserved his attention was to see whether his name was cited in the index. (More about the very smart, efficient, and not so humble fella here.)

Determining which book to buy is a similar dilemma.  It has also been solved by reviewing the index.  More here.

“Then again, … the information economy embraced millions of skilled, culturally literate, freelance oddballs.”

The quote is from a sad and scary New Yorker story that hit home with me.  Like many freelancers, I walk carefully on the sidewalk of The Road to Desperate Circumstances.

Like Ray Kachel, the freelancer in the story, will I end up under a bridge some day with just a duffel and a daypack?

First. Index. Ever.

Saint Augustine of Hippo — bishop, confessor, and Doctor of the Roman Church was a thoughtful and persuasive writer of the Fifth Century. Among many other topics, he wrote on homiletics, the study of Christian rhetoric and oratory. In 1467 his writing on The Art of Preaching was published by Peter Schöffer and Joahn Fust, colleagues of Johannes Gutenberg. It contained the first known alphabetical index.