Current example of such a question is Could I have purchased this Mongolian phrasebook while I was in Australia? As far as my understanding goes, it's asking whether it was possible to purchase a specific book in a specific country.
(The question that got me thinking was Looking for dead-tree Jules Verne books with Jules Férat's original engravings and a good translation.)
Generally SE is a not a good fit for recommendations. Pure shopping questions are even worse. The applicability of the answer for future readers is very doubtful. So let's not do that. I fully agree with the close voters and down voters.
We all know the "where can I find x" becomes stale quickly. That doesn't fit the SE model at all. We are looking for information to be timeless ... to be relevant for perpetuity. You may be able to find x today, but tomorrow after someone has bought it, it's gone. How does that support this community or anyone who frequents it, other than the OP. In a thought, it doesn't.
No. As others have said, such questions very quickly become stale. Asking about available translations of particular books might work, but this could become opinion-based. It must be possible to provide answers of lasting value to any question. For general where-to-buy questions, chat is the best option, imo. We could set up a dedicated chat room for this.
This site is for the study of literature, not for questions about the availability of certain books. These types of questions will generally help one person (the OP), and as such, aren't a great fit for the SE model.
The question is about literature.
The question is asking about an actual problem I'm facing. (The problem is that it's really inconvenient to read Michel Strogoff by flipping through two volumes at the same time, one for the text and one for the illustration. I've done that, but I'd really prefer an easier way.)
The question is specific enough. It's not a vague recommendation question where you have to guess what book will please me, I give specific criteria. If you have a volume in your hand, and you think it might be an answer for this question, you can tell whether it is by checking that it's a Hungarian translation of one of those novels, it is not any of the old translations I've identified, not an abridged edition half as long as the usual versions, and you can check that the illustrations are the ones I asked for by comparing them to the images I linked to.
I don't think the question has too many possible answers. I only need one good edition of each of the books, not a list of all printings.
Yes
The question is a actual problem with actual solutions. The question is objective in nature, not subjective (such as "what's a good book in category X?"). Other Stack Exchanges, such as the one for anime and manga, regard questions on how to obtain material as on-topic.
