You don’t trust Wikipedia, do you? I don’t. But it can be a great source for information like plain facts. Suppose you read that there were 16,594 persons executed during the French Revolution. Take the number or any other exact fact and put it into the search engine in Google Books, together with a search term for the situation. Here is an example: “french revolution 16,594″. View the illustration – click to see a larger picture. The red arrows show you the fact namespace, in this case, 16,594. The red rectangle shows the page to refer to, and the rest of the information for yoru reference can be found in the tab “About this book”.
When you write the reference in your paper or thesis, don’t fall for the identity scam of looking like you have read the whole book, and therfore going to some length of clouding the process of how you got this information. This is my suggestion:
This is an ordinary reference with name, year and page. But in addition to this, it’s fair to give the URL to the exact place in Google Books. You can do that in a footnote or endnote. I use endnotes for plane URL locations and footnotes for more explanatory things. This is how the endnote looks in the list I call Web Sources:
