Discussion summary
There are private efforts in Russia to digitize Soviet-era books, mainly in Russian, with some interest in translations. Researchers note the high quality of Soviet research due to cultural attitudes and limited emigration. American research was also prominent during the Cold War.
What the discussion says
- Russia has private digitization efforts mostly for Russian texts.
- Soviet researchers excelled due to cultural values and limited options to leave.
- American research was also highly influential during the Cold War.
“There are private efforts in Russia, mostly digitizing Soviet books in Russian.”
“Soviet researchers had high quality due to passion and access to education.”
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- Hacker News
- Very fond memories of Mir Publishers' science and math books growing up in India in the 80s and 90s. I think English translations were freely available in India. My grandfather would buy them for me to encourage my interest in science and math. If I could find physical copies of those books I would buy them in a heartbeat today.
Slight digression: Russian cartoons from that era are also very interesting. One of my favorite short cartoon from that era (I still hum its music involuntarily): Ikarus and the Wise Men [0]
by smath - Anyone interested in Soviet-era anything could do worse than check out rutracker. It's pretty usable with in-browser translate. A lot of it is of course, just contemporary piracy of .ru and western media, but they have interesting archives too.by stefanjpm
- We used to get these books in the annual international book fair in Delhi back in my childhood days. I still have 2 of them (Mathematics Can Be Fun and How The Steel Was Tempered), but I'm pretty sure we had several more at the time. They were fun reads, and the illustrations used to be great!by hiyer
- We had these in Sri Lanka, some of it translated to the local language and published by local publishers. I can't remember whether it was specifically a Mir publication, but I have fond memories of Y. Perelman's Mathematics can be Fun -- beautifully printed and hardbound, with meticulously drawn line art illustrations covering various applications of mathematics.by hliyan
- https://mirtitles.org/?s=Yakov+Perelman
All of Perelman's books are a must read, particularly by students. Few books can better motivate you in Science/Mathematics.
by rramadass - I have very fond memory of these books. We are from lower middle class family in India. My dad was fond of books. Western books were costly, but Soviet and Chinese books were of high quality and cheap. So we used to get loads of them from book fair.by blackoil
- I, too, have very fond memories of Mir Publishers. I was on vacation in Greece and had a stop in Athens, where I found by chance a bookshop which had books from Mir. the shop had irregular opening times but I managed to get there as often as I could, the books were dirt cheapby wolfi1
- Better link? https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
- thanks for this link, it's a great find!by freefaler
- Curator/maintainer of Mir Titles here.
The blog and the archive page are not in sync, we try to publish one book a day on the blog. The archive collection has more (recent) titles than the blog.
by the-mitr - Since we are on the topic of russian literature I'd definitely recommend reading something other than the usual suspects Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
One of my personal favourites is Bulgakov'с Master and Margarita and The Bull's Hour by Ivan Efremov.
Bull's Hour is actually amazing as it explores societies built on different principles using a form of a novel.
by nullorempty - >"Dostoevsky and Tolstoy"
I was born in USSR and was an still am avid reader. However never liked either of those two.
Totally agree about Efremov. Great writer
by FpUser - Some of the titles aren't translated - a cursory search did not turn up a downloadable version of the Bull's Hour, but search flibusta - titles are in russian but thanks to AI ...by nullorempty
- They were very cheap, and some like Landau and Lifschitz's textbooks on physics, world-class (and extremely challenging, volume 1 on mechanics assumed mastery of the calculus of variations).by fmajid
- A discussion on this happened recently here*:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739003
Someone (@rramadass) made me a good set of recommendations from the titles.
* Edit: I see now that linked comment too is from @clmul, the OP here. Thanks clmul!
by alok-g - Oh right, I saw that comment too, and grabbed a bunch of interesting-looking books on mathematics. Glad the website got more attention, good stuff!by lioeters
- Yep, i have been recommending these books and this site for a while now.
The reason? See my comment from 7 years ago! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21351115
The younger generation in particular need to know of these excellent resources for Science/Mathematics.
Another good publisher of old/classic Science/Mathematics books is "Dover Publications" - https://store.doverpublications.com/
Checkout for example, the books by Richard Hamming, in particular; "Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics" - https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486439457 (highly relevant to today's needs).
Also checkout the book series (mathematics via correspondence for high-school students) by I.M.Gelfand - https://store.doverpublications.com/search?type=product&q=I....
by rramadass - Maintainer/curator of the blog here. Please feel free to ask anything.
Glad to see this on the front page on HN, we had a similar bump some years back!
by the-mitr - Thank you for the effort of putting together the site and material, making the world a better place.by lioeters
- Hi! Is it possible to grab all these books as one bundle? I want to keep them locally for preservation and my kids when they grow upby para_parolu
- Very cool.
(Love to also see a collection of Soviet Life magazine. What's out there, that I have been able to find, is pretty slim.)
by JKCalhoun - Have you thought about a printing service so people can order hard copies from you/your-company? It will allow you to maintain/fund this work which i think is very much needed.
Also maybe redesign the site so it is more easily searchable (fast, functional but no jazz).
I have bought a few print copies from low-cost publishers on Amazon India but the quality has been iffy. Would be willing to pay extra for better quality.
by rramadass - I inherited a large (to me) collection of books from the USSR from my grandfather who immigrated here. Do you know how someone could find a collector or something who would appreciate them? I'm not looking to make money here, I just don't want the books to stay on the shelf of someone who will never read or appreciate them.by gravypod
- These were big in India until the mid-90s. I recall one book of "tales from the Baltic states" which we had at home. There were others, but I can't remember the titles very well. And for stuff coming from the Soviet era, they were remarkably non-judgy about the Tsareivichs and Tsarinas who inhabited the tales...
On the technical front, one book that I fondly recall, but I haven't seen since is Experiments Without Explosion by O.M.Olgin: https://archive.org/details/ExperimentsWithoutExplosions The title, as well as the content...
by shash - > I recall one book of "tales from the Baltic states" which we had at home.
That sounds interesting. Could it be this one I just photographed from my library?: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov...
Books being far more precious in those days, we kept these preserved, and my parents have brought them here so that my children may also experience the breadth of story-telling in other cultures.
Here are a few others from the series: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov... and https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov...
My greatest regret is not preserving the few African folktales anthologies that my parents bought me when I was young. I've found that different peoples have quite a variation of stories, and few are easily available today in English, with a great smearing of culture across most of the world with the Anglophone dominance and the shift to a visual medium as opposed to text.
But at least I have only a semi-Bowdlerized (i.e. early 1900s modern) version of tales by the Brothers Grimm and so on.
by arjie - I loved these old books. I think I had the Seven Clam Sisters or something like it. My parents managed to rescue and bring to the US two childhood stories I really enjoyed: The Long Haired Maiden, and Shihan and the Snail[0].
These old folk tales are really entertaining. Often there’s no real moral or anything. It’s just a story. And to this day I really like these stories that are just “this happened and that person did that” and so on which don’t have to say “And the message is X”.
Unrelatedly, my wife jokes that I ended up marrying a Taiwanese woman because my childhood was spent reading folk tales about Chinese women.
0: both these are somewhere on archive.org e.g. https://archive.org/details/thelonghairedmaiden
by arjie - Thanks for sharing the link. The Long Haired Maiden was beautifully illustrated and i enjoyed the story.by xp84