To me this would seem on topic (as long as they're books on topics to do with the great outdoors of course.) I have however had questions closed for this reason on SO before, so wanted to check - what do people think?
I'm editing this question and bringing it to the fore because it is 5 years old and the people who answered it are no longer active on the site. The current active users should have a chance to weigh in.
Of course it's going to be OK. Would you ask people to not recommend or discuss their experiences with courses, books, and teachers when they want to learn about outdoor activities?
Yes - there will always be bad questions that get closed. Vague, overly broad, underly specific, as well as narrow and isolated questions where no other person would ever need to have the same question answered that the moderators will close if they cannot be edited into shape.
The likelihood that many people may be inclined to ask the exact same question means we only need to watch and perhaps later, have a section in the FAQ once we detect a pattern to the bad questions. Worrying too much about something that hasn't happened yet is something that probably can be skipped at this point.
My instinctive opinion is "yes! I like books, bring it on."
On reflection, however, I think book recommendations would be subjective and so not approriate for a Stack Exchange Q&A, see Good Subjective, Bad Subjective.
Book recommendations would also be "too localised", new books are published all the time, say we had a book recommendation question with lots of answers. One day someone writes the canonical, best book on the subject ever. Would people find it to vote it up if it was on the second page of a long list of previous recommendations?
Also, do we really want to tell people to go and read a book instead of participating in our site? :-)
This site is almost perfect for certain types of book recommendations. If I am looking for a trails book, I'm much more inclined to get the one that has 40 upvotes than the one which has two.
I would say that I'd prefer that there only be one book per answer on that type of question.
Here how it stands right now,
Book recommendation questions that were considered on topic and good questions.
Questions that were closed
And one that was turned into a community wiki
Personally, I think that book recommendations are on topic, but they need to be specific to a situation.
