When I write a question or an answer, I often want to reference basic, textbook-level information. When I can, I prefer to cite this information, at least to the level of title, author and chapter. My answer to this question is an example of my typical style in this regard. Usually when I like to include a link to the book on Amazon so that I am clear to all potential readers what book I am referring to. So this brings me to my questions:
- Does the StackExchange community have a standard way to refer to textbooks? If so, am I close? If not, should we develop one?
- I vaguely recall seeing what I thought was an Amazon affiliate link on Physics.SE; does StackExchange do that? Do we care?
- When I do this, I manually look the book up on Amazon. I suppose at some point I should set up a list of books I like to reference. Would it be useful to have a publicly useable/editable list of references to textbooks for this purpose?
- Is Amazon even the best/most convenient seller? I'm only looking for an unambiguous reference, I know that it's easy for others to use them, and using them fits easily into my already-established workflow. But I'm not particularly wedded to Amazon if there is a better way to do this.
Tags
on the main screen, and you'll see what I mean. Most of ours are not built up yet, but you can always start. So, you could keep a list of organic books under theorganic-chemistry
tag wiki (see here for where you can edit it yourself). Look on someplace like Stack Overflow for good examples. A centralized list is something we'd have to talk about. $\endgroup$