Thirty years after learning E&M from the wonderful book by Purcell, I noticed that the copyright page of my dog-eared copy of the 1965 edition includes a notice stating that it is available for use by authors and publishers on a royalty-free basis after 1970. The book has gone through two more editions since then, with many improvements. The third edition, by Purcell and Morin, is in print as of 2013. The third edition is great. It includes SI units, new applications, and new problems. I happily bought a copy as soon as it came out. However, I want to produce a nice, free, LaTeX-ed version of the 1965 edition to make this fantastic book available to students who don't have the money for a copy of the commercial version. Once it's in LaTeX format it can continue to be worked on and improved, in parallel with the commercial edition. (Once it's complete, the first thing I intend to do is redo the whole thing in SI units.)
The project I've started up is here: http://www.lightandmatter.com/purcell/ [Broken] . There is a github page with the source code. To be polite, I've contacted the publisher and let them know what was up. They seemed a little nonplussed but didn't express any objections. I've offered my students small amounts of extra credit to help with the conversion to LaTeX, but frankly they're rather inefficient at it, and they don't save me much time relative to the time it would have taken to convert n pages myself. I've gotten some pretty good OCR output (which is included in a file on the github site), so it's not really a question of typing in the English text. The main work that needs to be done is just the conversion of the math, which requires both some knowledge of the subject and at least minimal facility with LaTeX.
If anyone here would like to contribute to this project, even by doing the math for a single page, that would be much appreciated. A pdf of the original book is available (legally, based on the license!) at a link from the project's web page.