I had high hopes for this list, with a prize of £30K awarded on 18 November. The award should go to ‘the book that is judged to have provided the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues’, so current affairs that readers really might want to refer back to in the near or perhaps distant future. My comments on the indexes in the shortlisted books follow:

• The Alchemists: Inside the secret world of central bankers by Neil Irwin (Headline publishing) – a professional-looking index, done in what I think of as the US style with all the headings starting with a capital letter, which works OK in this context, but can lead to terms looking more important than they actually are. Some nice cross-referencing going on – ‘Employment losses’ directs to ‘Unemployment’, ‘Super Mario Brothers’ directs to ‘Draghi, Mario; Monti, Mario’.
• Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cuckier (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) – another professional-looking index. Not many examples of undifferentiated locators, so perhaps the entries that had them couldn’t be given subheadings. Some use of double entry to make it easier to locate information, for example ‘marine navigation’ has a main entry, and also a subheading under ‘Maury, Matthew Fontaine’ and all the subheadings under ‘correlation analysis’ also appear as main headings.
• The Billionaire’s Apprentice by Anita Raghavan – print book not available to look inside on Amazon.
• The Everything Store by Brad Stone – sadly for a book about Amazon you couldn’t see the print book when I first wrote this blog in November 2013. By late January 2014 the ‘look inside’ version was available and you can see a detailed index, quite heavy on names of people, brands and products and with some undifferentiated locators for some of the subheadings. But at least the feature has been enabled.
• Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (W H Allen) – Some examples of undifferentiated locators, for example ‘Facebook’ gathers 30. Sandberg works for Facebook, so it was obviously going to feature in the book. But without subheadings the browsing reader can’t see what she’s written about it. This is odd, given that some headings accrued masses of subheadings for a relatively small number of locators overall, for example ‘parenting’ where 14 subheadings have been teased out and three of them cover aspects of ‘stay-at-home’. So the indexing is a little uneven, although it may reflect the contents of the book.
• Making it Happen by Iain Martin – print book not available to look inside on Amazon.

Something of a shame that there are only 3 available to ‘see inside’ on Amazon. The winner was the book about Amazon by Brad Stone.