Books and reference lists: It isn't easy to track down all of the references, now is it...
I've been thinking about the problem of tracking down references in books for quite some time. At least a couple of years now, as my library of game programming books has begun to breach the 50+ mark. Now, each book has a series of references to secondary sources used when writing the book. This type of reference section is required and your publisher will kick you in the butt if you don't properly attribute where you got the information from. It also leads credence to your book, since having other sources agree with you is never a bad thing. With the advent of the Internet (thanks Gore), many references are now links to web papers, normally research papers, that are permanently held somewhere on a university server. Other references simply disappear and then you go to look them up and you get nothing. So what can we do about this?
Well some books are including internet references on the CD now. So you can just look up the PDF, DOC, or HTML file right there. Others have huge lists in the back that can take hours to properly traverse. Looking up books on Amazon.com doesn't help since they don't list the references there. Looking up books through the publisher doesn't work either. If I took some time I guess I could create a links page that traversed all of the references from each of the books I have. Maybe that would be useful? If not for others, it would at least be useful to me? What would be the legal issues with me publishing a list of references that a particular book uses for others to consume? Would it drop sales because people can go straight to the horses mouth?
Personally, I'd love to be able to look up an ISBN then get a list of references and traverse the list in real-time, perhaps using Amazon, so that I can investigate each of the references in detail. In the case of web articles, I'll get to see the content immediately. Perhaps reading the abstract content will entice me to actually buy the book I'm looking at. If nothing else, it tells me how many references the author processed in writing his book.
If you know of anything or anyone doing this drop me some information in the comments. If you know of any XML formats out there that support lists of references, then let me know that as well. I'll toss all of my books online somewhere and make a web-service and traversal client available. Primarily since I'll be using it quite a bit myself. I have to say I've never really traversed the references in many of my books because of how time consuming it would be. Especially the constant cross referencing in the Game Programming Gems and AI Game Programming Wisdom books.