Citing Books or Paywalled Content

Hello all,

I am in the middle of preparing my first argument for a foreign policy debate I want to post. However, I am weary about actually doing the debate for one reason, my sources. The vast majority of my sources come from books, which obviously aren't available for free on the internet, which sort of leaves me in a bind. I know it is poor form to cite something that is trapped behind a price tag, but I really like my sources and I do not want to scouer the internet to find something which makes the same claims as those contained in my books.

Could I take screenshots of the part of the book I am looking to source (they're all online copies) or does that remove too much context? Is there anything I can do?

I actually had a situation where the only source I had was the book. However, the book was available for free online.

Plus, cant you just use the name of the book itself as the source, or maybe quote from that book?

It seems a bit strange that a debating site would accept random articles as sources, but not the book itself. 

Of course, its a bit too much to expect from voters or opponent to read the entire book, but if you use quotes from the book, I dont see why it shouldnt be sufficient, especially when the specific content of the book cannot be found in any article or review, which happens often since articles only cover small part of the book.

Of course, you should try to use free articles since thats what voters on this site are used to. But quotes from book plus articles might deliver an extra punch. Book alone, I am not sure how will it go since voters arent really used to that and the debates where I used book as source mainly either got no votes either I won due to forfeit. I havent seen voters giving any appreciation to the book as the source, despite that scientific books are closest thing to science that we have. The scientific articles are the ones who are usually out of context, since they tend to be short and mainly done for sponsors, but voters dont see it that way.

As a voter, I don’t treat it as negatively as posting, say, an academic paper that exists behind a paywall, which I view as a bit of a dick move as well as a deliberate attempt to prevent people from reading deeper into your material. I do think if you can find an online version of the book, that’s a best case scenario, though even then I’d recommend directing to a few pages (to include context) for the sake of making things simpler for voters.

If you can’t do that, including a picture of at least a page or two would not be amiss. I agree with BK that you should certainly quote it directly in the body of your argument, and include at least a few sentences for basic context. Paraphrasing works fine when you have full context, but with books, it’s not always that simple. If you do that, as a voter, I would view it rather similarly to most other published sources. There’s room for your opponent to argue that they said something elsewhere that disagrees with you, but that’s always the case.

You can get around paywalls for academic papers and most people here are students who can view most academic papers for free through their school

Fine in Russia, but what about in North America.

This is perhaps my biggest gripe with the way debates are conducted on this site. That is, the "expectation" that everything is readily available on an easily accessible online source. Perhaps it's my age, but I'm accustomed to conducting research by actually reading the material on the subject, whether it be books, journals, encyclopedias, almanacs, published essays, etc. And while I laud the readily available information which can be accessed on the internet, I think the oversupply has devalued said information, and has even diminished the eagerness to seek it. There are those who are no longer seeking information; they're just seeking regurgitation. And all this just goes to show the worth of an online debate--that is, if the information isn't worth much, then why would the debate be? Is one seeking information or just a transient gratification of having bested an opponent who's marginally less knowledgeable than oneself?

There is a service in America. Kind of like libgen but for academic papers. I forget th name, but it is on the clear web. 

For me so long as there’s an abstract available,I’m ok with it. Granted, I’ve quoted plenty of abstracts without reading the full papers.

I don't ever read the full paper. It is up to my opponent to find out why my source is bullshit, not me. 

Well said!