Just last Friday (…happy Friday…): some books from the University of Arizona Press‘ Space Science series are now open access. To an extent, this is great:
Asteroids and Asteroids II
The Galaxy and the Solar System
Meteorites and the Early Solar System
Resources of Near-Earth Space
Protostars and Planets: back editions (PP, PPII, PPIII, PPIV)
All are now downloadable as (reasonably-) big .pdfs. Apparently the font and design are clean enough, and the illustrations few enough, that the filesizes just aren’t that bad.
Of course, nothing in life is truly free. These are all dated volumes; we are now up to Asteroids IV, John Lewis has written the follow-up to Resources, and PPVII is now out. In some cases, the new edition is online and open; I’m guessing there’s some discretion d’auteur at play. But in other cases, no. Therefore, some of these (I’m looking at you, AII and PP/PPII) are worth a skim but not as a course text. Meanwhile, The Galaxy and the Solar System is thoroughly dated, and I’m guessing not very flattering in the eyes of their contributing authors. TGSS predates interstellar objects and exoplanetary systems, of course, but also most exozodiacal disks (except one), ALMA and most submillimeter discoveries, brown dwarves, the sheer force of Moore’s Law against dynamical questions, and even Hipparcos. It invokes comets in multiple ways, yet predates Rosetta, and is even a bit early for good Giotto/Vega conclusions.
But let’s not be thankful. I admit I read Asteroids II, nearly cover to cover, knowing that AIV was already out. The questions AII raises are valid questions, even after many of the answers have been found. Didacticism, Socratic method, etc. There’s also some value in having these as “shelf references,” even if one’s shelf is now digital. Some of them have Appendices that are worth it by themselves (…assuming the later decimal places aren’t too far off today). So thanks, University of Arizona Press!