regarding quoting from books

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

As far as mailing list postings are concerned, you can quote short extracts
without explicit permission, for the sake of elucidation/criticism etc., and
for making your own point. Take care to give proper attribution and
publication details (publisher, year, page numbers). Avoid making a posting
that consists entirely of a reproduction from a book. It would be a better
idea to simply give the details of the book. The same goes for online
newspaper articles also. Giving the URL should be sufficient, instead of
including the entire text.

Vidyasankar