How to make a reference book easy to navigate?

Question

I am assembling a reference book which has short entries arranged alphabetically. It also has a deep section hierarchy, e.g.:

A
    Am
        Amtrak
    An
        animals
            bears
            penguins
        Anime
        Animation

The book is quite large and readers might often need to flip between pages. I find it too difficult to navigate. Many books of this type have letters cut into the edge of the pages, so if one looks near the margins, they can quickly see which page they are at and how to easily get to other pages, but cutting the pages in this manner is not an option at my printer.

I would like to enable readers to be able to easily see which page they are currently on, where the current page fits within the chapter-section hierarchy, and how they can easily jump to their next desired page. What is a good way to do this?

Answer 1

An alternative to cutouts (usually called thumb indexes) is to have outside margins printed with your desired navigational aids. Consider the following two images, taken from subsequent chapters in a book:

Update

In reference to another answer posted to this question, if a multi-level solution is required, something like this should suffice:

A and its sub-indexes would start at the top of the page, B and its sub-indexes would start in the middle, and C and its sub-indexes could occupy the bottom third; D would start at the top, and the cycle would continue. When the book's pages are somewhat "fanned", you can easily see where to jump to.

Answer 2

This is a bit like an issue I'm having with a report design I'm working on. The option I'm looking into is to have the page navigation element on the margin of every page with the current section highlighted. In your case it might look a bit like this.

Report design is a small part of what I do so I'm not aware of technical names, theory or practice around techniques like this - hopefully someone more print/book focussed can add to this answer.

Also my implementation of it is pretty crude - the main list in a master page (if I needed a second layer I'd have a bunch of different page types, one for each letter) and then there's are highlight objects with a blend mode (in this case multiply) on each page as appropriate. You'll need larger or multiple highlight objects where there are multiple on a page. There may be a better way I'm not aware of - but it seems to work in my case and might work for yours.

Depending on the printing, you might be able to get the highlighting colour to show through on the edges of the pages, which would help someone see where in the book they should start digging.

Answer 3

In the directories I work on a few have the side tabs for the section heading and then the subheading is at the top corner. In other directories we only do the headings in the top corners. Really we have extensive TOC with every category listed - 9 pages or so for one of the publications we do that has lots of categories. Many of those are listed but refer to something else like "Waste Disposal - See Environmental Services" and in the directory we have the category showing again but saying "See Environmental Services" underneath it.

I know this isn't exactly a solution like the others have been providing but this is how we do it so thought I'd offer it up as another option for you.