Best practice for quoting an offline reference

Question

I have an extensive library of books about plants and recently had occasion to quote a section from a book in an answer. As the content of the book is not available online I referred to a listing on Amazon.

On Stack Overflow and all Stack Exchange sites this policy is now in effect which, I believe, indicates attribution for all quoted works in is order.

On this site "attribution" in my answers is usually a link.

When you cannot link to an online source is a top hit like the source on Amazon acceptable?

Answer 1

The policy also requests that you state the author(s) names as well. This is unrealistic when providing an embedded link, and hard to do when quoting from Wikipedia ( not that I do ) since there might be multiple authors. Even if this is considered a straw man argument, many papers have multiple authors when quoting from pubmed.

Anyway, going back to your question, I'm inclined to just quote the book name, edition and page numbers. We don't really need the extra work of finding a book store online just to satisfy the odd person who can't locate it themselves. And link rot ensures that often a link to a store won't last.