Academic Standards

Most academic books are bad. Nearly all of them. I doubt if the situation is particularly worse than at any other time. But there is something else I view as troubling: good books with bad proofreading and useless indexes. With a bad book, bad proofreading doesn't matter particularly, and a bad index doesn't matter at all. But what troubles me is that editors are publishing good books, books that will be cited for years and decades, as though they will be read once and left on the train. With a new author, perhaps the time investment isn't worth doing things right, though this indicates a telling lack of confidence in the material. But books by established authorities continue to emerge with distracting numbers of typos and lax fact checking—this is at least selfish, since it condemns the rest of us to endless [sic]s—and pointless onomastic indexes. As to that index, this is the digital age, I imagine an editor objecting, who needs it? To which I reply: make your full text available online and searchable (mangle the text any way you like, just give me the page number!) and I withdraw the complaint.