Luna Cognita ebook sale

[Jeff Crilly]

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4939-1664-1

Been watching for the occasional discount on the Luna Cognita 3-volume hardcover… none this season.  Yet.

However the ebook is on sale for $17.99.  And while I feel the hardcover is more appropriate for this kind of book I went ahead and purchased the ebook version as it’s likely I might read it more often if it’s on the phone.

Ps it’s a 1.48GB download. 

(Note: used epub for the iPhone.   PDF will have to wait for laptop.)

[Mark Wagner]

I don't know how widely known it is, but this author, Robert Garfinkle, is (or was?) a local guy and SJAA member.  Gave a number of interesting talks  there   (Moon, star hopping) years ago.

[Mark Scrivener]

Thanks Jeff. I ordered it as well. Considering how infrequently I use my hardcover astro books in the field, the e-book might be just the ticket.

BTW - the PDF download link provided opens the book directly in my browser (rather than downloading a file to disk), which means it's painfully slow. Chrome also insists only on saving it as an XML document, then didn't save it, saying the site wasn't available. In any case, it is open in my browser for the moment. Will have to figure this out later....

Mark

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[David Kirjassoff]

I’m having a hard time getting g this to download. It’s painfully slow and times out before it’s even partially downloaded.  Any suggestions?

[Jeff Crilly]

It’s a 1.5GB file.  

On the iphone I downloaded the epub format and it eventually opened in books app.  

For the PDF , on a pc / mac , I read from the reviews that one needs to right-click-save-as. 

I tried downloading the PDF briefly on the Mac and… afaict I need to let the browser (Safari) download the PDF.  Then I think I’ll be able to save it locally and read it with preview.  

Right now I’m not on a decent internet connection at the moment to work this out. 

On Nov 18, 2025, at 12:34 PM, David Kirjassoff <dkirj...@gmail.com> wrote:

I’m having a hard time getting g this to download. It’s painfully slow and times out before it’s even partially downloaded.  Any suggestions?

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sf-bay-tac/20a7ef25-73ea-401e-8bb9-2c088ea72b1cn%40googlegroups.com.

[Mark Scrivener]

I finally got the PDF to download. I can use it in Adobe Acrobat, but not Acrobat Reader (crashes as soon as I navigate in the file). Opening it on Chrome is super slow.

The EPUB version seems to work better - just download a reader (I'm using Thorium on my PC)

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[David Kirjassoff]

Thanks, I finally got it to work.   Downloaded the epub using Safari on my Mac.   Just took a long time, must be a slow or busy server. 

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 18, 2025, at 4:07 PM, Mark Scrivener <markwsc...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Jeff Crilly]

I presume it is doing an HTTP downloads in the browser which isn’t ideal.

I also was able to download the PDF and EPUB this morning on the Mac.   

Used safari; couldn’t figure out a better alternative , eg with curl (got a 400 with curl - there some sort of handshake, probably DRM protection).

(I didn’t bother with Chrome, so I can’t speak to it.)

On the Mac, the download was under 2 minutes for each file.  (Xfinity broadband w/ a speediest of 551 Mbps down, 113 Mbps up.)

PDF:  I let the download complete (in Safari), then did File->Save-As to put the PDF somewhere and give it a decent name.   I’m setup to use preview.app to read PDFs which works fine.

EPUB:  The epub file ended up in my Downloads folder.   I moved it elsewhere and renamed it.   Double-clicking on the epub launches the Books app which presents the ebook quite nicely.

-jeff

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[David Kirjassoff]

What a great book though.  Well worth a little trouble.