The University of Michigan Press is working with HathiTrust Digital Library to provide free access to over 1,000 books by the end of 2009.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Launched in 2008, HathiTrust is a digital preservation repository and research management tool for the world's great research libraries, focused on providing scholars in the digital age with the largest collection of electronic research material this side of Google Book Search and large-scale, full-text searching and archiving tools to manage it.
"Presses have had online previews and PDFs of sample chapters, tables of contents, and sometimes entire books on their Web sites for years," said Phil Pochoda, director of the U-M Press. "The HathiTrust partnership is something entirely new that takes into account the actual pursuit of broad dissemination of scholarly information.
"Security restrictions are in place to protect the integrity of the product, but with HathiTrust, a full view of the material is there. It's searchable and it's available to anyone with access. If you want to either search for or happen to come across Michigan Press books, you can look through them onscreen anywhere, anytime."
In keeping with the U-M's leadership role in the use of digitization and print-on-demand technology, U-M Press seeks to push the boundaries of the rapidly changing publishing world to position its resources where many different kinds of audiences can find them, Pochoda said.
Utilizing the latest technology, readers and researchers will find multiple ways to find what they are looking for. HathiTrust links to the U-M Press site allow for fast online purchasing.
In addition to a partnership with HathiTrust, content on Amazon and hundreds of U-M Press books in Google Book Search (in which the U-M Library was one of the original participants), U-M Press has had a "Look Inside" feature on its own book Web pages for several years.
With text search ability powered by Google, the "Look Inside" feature on the U-M Press Web site is another tool for viewing each title without damaging the integrity of the product. It currently contains thousands of table-of-contents and sample chapter views, with more than 100 complete titles available for full viewing and hundreds more complete titles planned for full view by the end of 2009.