Are textbooks in their traditional form still relevant? Increasingly feedback from students reveals that they read fewer texts and spend more time reading online material. Textbooks have to compete for attention from instantly searchable material available on a computer screen anywhere in the world at the click of a mouse. The internet makes not just one point of view or explanation but tens, hundreds or thousands available in an instant. Academic staff have seen the development of the internet but learned the material they teach from textbooks, meanwhile the students they teach have now grown up in the internet age and have little concept of life without it. The staff and the students they teach gather information in different ways. Who is to say which is best?

As the influence of the internet has grown Fundamentals of Geophysics has been published and has established itself as one of the most widely used geophysics textbooks. It has recently been revised and published in a second edition. This new edition is similar to the first, with one major change: the contents of the final chapter on Geodynamics from the first edition have been incorporated into chapters one to five of the second edition. In my mind this is an improvement because much of this material now follows in context from the more introductory material in each chapter. So this edition is now composed of five chapters on: The Earth as a planet; Gravity, the figure of the Earth and geodynamics; Seismology and the internal structure of the Earth; Earth's age, thermal and electrical properties; and Geomagnetism and palaeomagnetism. Each chapter presents the material in a clear and concise manner with good clear illustrations. The figures have also been slightly updated, increasing their clarity, although this was not a problem with the first edition. What I have always found useful about this text, is that although the chapter titles suggest that it is primarily about the large-scale structure and properties of Earth it also contains a really comprehensive introduction to the various geophysical techniques as used in near-surface applications. The mathematical treatment is at an appropriate level for second- and third-level students of geophysics but it can also be read by students with limited mathematical ability.

The edition has also ‘moved with the times’: it is now available as an e-book, which I have not seen but I presume is a pdf edition that can be read on a computer or palm device, and this development is a clear move to reach out to the internet generation. There are also resources for lecturers for which I registered (it takes about a week to obtain the password necessary to access this material). These include copies of the figures as pdfs, which are excellent high-resolution versions of those in the text, and solutions to the problems at the end of each chapter. The solutions are an excellent addition. They are presented in the same format as the textbook, extensively illustrated and detailed and really add to understanding of the problem and why it was set.

This is an excellent textbook. I have recommended the first edition to geophysics students and to students who take a level 2 planetary science course that I teach to physics students, and I will be recommending this edition in the future. Whether the students will read it remains to be seen but I will be continuing to use it as one of the texts on which the courses I teach are structured.