Our first Russian ebook : the October 2020 Slavonic item of the month

Acquiring ebooks from Eastern Europe and former Soviet states is by no means a straightforward business. A great deal of publishers across this enormous area publish only in print. Those who do produce ebook versions may not produce these for institutional purchase. As our readers probably know, even if an ebook is available for an individual to buy, it may not be available for libraries to buy.

In terms of the main countries I buy from, Russia provides the greatest number of institutional ebook options. Cambridge staff and students had trial access to various Russian ebook platforms earlier in the year, and some good use was made of these. At this point, there is not enough evidence that buying access to a whole Russian ebook package would be good value for money, so for 20/21 I am instead simply planning to buy certain individual titles as ebooks. The first title is now in the catalogue: Sergeĭ Nikolaevich Bulgakov edited by A.P. Kozyrev. This has been bought from East View, through their Slavica and Judaica platform, shown in the screenshot above. The book explores the views and theories advanced by Bulgakov, a major figure in Russian (and later Russian émigré) philosophy. To those with greater knowledge of art than philosophy, he might be best known from Mikhail Nesterov’s famous ‘Filosofy’ (Philosophers) painting of Bulgakov and Pavel Florenskiĭ.

The purchase of the Bulgakov volume as an ebook helped ensure rapid access for the doctoral student who had asked for it. Earlier volumes from the series it was published in (Russian philosophy of the first half of the 20th century) were bought in print. From this point on, I will need to consider whether to purchase further volumes as ebooks or physical books. It is good at least to have the choice. Sergeĭ Nikolaevich Bulgakov was published by ROSSPĖN (short for Russian Political Encyclopaedia, whose website is one of the few I know which uses the .su suffix created for the Soviet Union), a publisher whose books are largely available electronically.

Certainly for the countries I select material from, including Russia, print books largely remain the only viable option, and we will continue to buy hard copies when that is the case. Here are a few examples of print books we have recently received and processed (but beware of incomplete catalogue records for these and the Bulgakov titles at this stage): one in Ukrainian about post-WW2 Ukrainian graphic design (S950.b.201.6519), one in Romanian – a donation – about medieval Transylvania (C202.b.4873), and the remainder in Russian (on Buriat written culture (C216.c.5849), historical sources about the city of Dmitrov (C206.d.4430), Mongolian written and oral epic literature (C216.c.5844), and migration policy in modern Russia and “donor” countries (C216.c.5847)). Of these six, only the last would have been purchasable as an ebook.