James Graham schrieb:
FWIW, I know, offhand, the ISBN of exactly zero books (whereas I could probably quote from several). Therefore it would take considerable effort for me to find the ISBN of a book I was quoting (I would have to spend time looking it up on the book or online somewhere), then more
Amazon will tell you.
effort to carefully copy the human unfriendly string into whatever tool was demanding this apparently superfluous information. I would imagine that "three seconds" is an underestimate of about an order of magnitude.
30 seconds sounds more reasonable.
This last bit is the killer; people hate doing mundane things even when they have to (I've never met anyone who enjoys filling in BibTeX citations, for example and that is of comparable difficulty to the process you advocate), and certainly won't do if if they see no benefit for their efforts (even if some minority group will).
Best regards, Julian
