b schewek wrote:
There has not been one reason given so far why WP should link to booksellers in the first place.
Well, that's a conversation that we've had more than once, see.
It's clearly useful to many readers. It's not evil to buy books. It's not even evil to sell books.
Let's say we have an article about Stephen King (we do). And an article about one of his books (we do). Why should we not link to a page that lets people know how they can do more research by actually obtaining the book? The user might want to buy it, or borrow it from a library, or read reviews of it, etc.
I've seen arguments that I respect (though I'm ultimately unconvinced) as to why we should not link to Amazon in particular. But I've seen no argument to suggest that linking to booksellers _generally_ is a bad thing. Why should it be?
I suppose some might argue that any form of voluntary exchange, money for books, is immoral. But, I'd like to see it.
WP does not link to Art/Music/Video/Computer/Coin/Stamp/... sellers as well? Maybe the whole "link to seller" idea should be reviewed.
I see no problem with such links, so long as they meet the kind of helpfulness criteria that we use for books. One nice thing about books is that the ISBN does exist as a universal identifier that makes this technically feasible... I don't think such numbers exist for things link Coins, Stamps, etc. (For music and video, perhaps they do?)
Just for the record, after nearly 24 hours with the link on the book sources page, sales and revenue to us are $0.00. It's a bit early to tell, but I think it's fairly clear that this (linking for money) is going to be a complete nonissue anyway.
--Jimbo