Not only Jules Verne. What about H.G. Wells? I'd also include Arthur Conan Doyle. Most of the science fiction in Sherlock Holmes has turned into science fact, but in some ways that actually makes it more relevant for your purposes.

More recent classics would include the Heinlein juveniles (almost everything he wrote before Strange in a Strange Land plus some of what he wrote afterwards) and (as others mentioned) the Asimov books. The robot series is more for programmers than scientists, but there's quite a bit of interesting science floating around Asimov.

Not classics, but the Tom Swift and Danny Dunn books are oriented towards juveniles and promote science.

That's true of the first asteroid, but after that, you get too much loss from having to send out the scouts and sample collectors from the Earth's surface. The advantage with this system is that once it's set up, they can build their spacecraft in space. That saves the energy costs of a ground to space launch.

It's also worth noting that energy is cheap in space. On the ground, you either have to worry about radiation (fission reactions) or atmospheric loss (solar power). In space, solar panels are effectively more efficient, as they can operate around the clock (no night) and with direct solar radiation. Therefore, a factory built in space does not require earth bound resources to operate.

The first phase (where they launch everything from the ground) is incredibly expensive and offers minimal return. Once they are set up though, it becomes much cheaper. Your proposal would leave them always in the expensive first phase. It is a cheaper version of the first phase, but that doesn't help since the first phase is so much more expensive.

That's essentially been the problem with our space program. We've always been in the first phase. We launch everything from the ground, which uses up ground based resources. This is expensive. What if we changed to only launch people from the ground? It would be much cheaper and easier to obtain iron and other needed minerals in space. Until we do that, our space program cannot sustain itself. It's a drain of resources, not a generator.

Really? Many textbooks are used by professors at universities and supported quite heavily. I think that the problem that these guys had was that they tried to follow the old model, where textbook writing subsidizes the university professor's salary. A more realistic model is for a group of professors to band together to write a textbook (or rewrite one that is in the public domain). That can work because professors are paid based on prestige (i.e. the university is effectively subsidizing the textbook rather than the other way around). However, that model doesn't include a publisher, except one that does print-on-demand (as Amazon and university presses do).

I think that the biggest problem is that near-perpetual copyright means that books have to be quite old before they go out of copyright. That means that all the existing public domain books are out of print and out of date. Writing a book from scratch takes time. Once they have the books, it will probably be easier to keep them up to date under an open source model. Unfortunately, it's hard to get started.