[2] A Sputnik-era project funded by the National Science Foundation grant, the book is influential for its use of relativity in the presentation of the subject at the undergraduate level.

[4] The 1965 edition, now supposed to be freely available due to a condition of the federal grant, was originally published as a volume of the Berkeley Physics Course (see below for more on the legal status).

[7] The review continues, stating that "despite the criticism, this text is very beautifully written and gives a well-structured and clear insight into the topic" and "can be recommended to any student" for use in an introductory course on electromagnetic.

[4] Roy Schwitters writes in a Physics Today review of Andrew Zangwill's Electrodynamics that he advises undergraduates to pick up the third edition of this book.

Jermey N. A. Mathews listed it as one of the five books that stood out in Physics Today in 2013, acknowledging that there were issues with the previous writings, however, the publication noted that "clearly, Purcell's E&M matures slowly.

[3] Because it was funded by the National Science Foundation, the original editions of the Berkeley Physics Series contained notices on their copyright pages stating that the books were to be available royalty-free in five years.

The copyright page[12] of the original 1965 edition of Electricity and Magnetism includes a notice stating that it is available for use by authors and publishers on a royalty-free basis after 1970.

Crowell wrote that this made it effectively impossible to obtain the royalty-free license promised under the original government contract and that this uncertainty places an open-source version of the first edition in legal limbo.