From a University of California news release–with links added to individual titles:
More than 500 University of California Press books are available online free of charge through an ongoing partnership between UC Press and the California Digital Library. The University of California Press eScholarship Editions can be searched and browsed at http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ucpress/ .
Over 300 of the University of California Press eScholarship Editions are available to the public. The other titles are currently only available to UC faculty, students and staff. Readers outside the UC system may view citations, abstracts and tables of contents, but not the full texts.
Titles available to all readers include Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California, Understanding Heart Disease; AIDS: The Burdens of History, Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad; and A History of Wine in America.
By fall 2003, 1,500 UC Press eScholarship Editions will be available. More than 400 titles will be available to the public; owing to licensing restrictions, the rest will be limited to the UC community.
The full collection will represent about a third of the UC Press books in print, plus over 300 out-of-print titles. The books cover a wide range of topics of interest to the general public as well as to scholars, including art, science, history, music, religion, natural history, and fiction. Many titles are currently used in courses, and University of California students are particularly excited about their free, online availability.
Additional comments from TeleRead: Completely in character, the UC Press will publish Culture, Inc.: How Greed and Carelessness Are Destroying the Arts In America, by Bill Ivey, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts. In the words of the Publishers Lunch e-mail list, the book will explain “how copyright law and corporate practice have separated Americans from our cultural heritage” and tell “what we can do today to preserve a vibrant artistic legacy for the future.” Significantly, Ivey is a folklorist and musician–and thus highly aware of the damage that copyright zealots can do to the culture of future generations.
