More logic books available online …

Richard Zach, over at LogBlog, has posted this:

Exciting developments! The Association of Symbolic Logic has made the now-out of print volumes in the Lecture Notes in Logic (vols. 1-12) and Perspectives in Mathematical Logic (vols. 1-12) open-access through Project Euclid. This includes classics like

• Shoenfield’s Recursion Theory,
• Lindström’s Aspects of Incompleteness in the LNL,
• Sacks’ Higher Recursion Theory,
• Hájek and Pudlák’s Metamathematics of First-order Arithmetic,
• Shelah’s Proper and Improper Forcing,
• Barwise’s Admissible Sets and Structures, and
• Barwise and Feferman’s Model-theoretic Logics in the PiML.

I’m especially excited about the Hájek/Pudlák and Barwise/Feferman volumes, which are chock-full of useful material!

This is indeed an excellent development (I’m not sure why Project Euclid puts the books up in chapter-length chunks and then complains if you download too many chunks at once: but let’s not sound ungrateful, because I’m certainly not!).

Looking around online, you can in fact find a large number of logic books available, though most of them are there contrary to copyright. Frankly, I don’t feel guilty about having a bootleg e-book on my laptop if the hard copy acquired with hard cash is sitting on my shelves. But it would be wonderful if this is the beginning of a trend for out-of-print classics to be made freely available in high-quality PDFs.