Item — HN Reader

Mir publications (in English and other languages) were very popular in many countries of the world where they were affordable and available. It was one of the best things to come out of the Soviet era. They were excellent across the board. It is fashionable nowadays to badmouth everything "Soviet" but their focus on educating the masses in Science & Technology was farsighted.

See my responses in this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346272 where i am exhorting people to bring them back into print :-)

From the above same thread, link to the archive - https://archive.org/details/@mirtitles?&sort=-publicdate&pag...

1 comments

I am the maintainer/curator of the mirtitles blog. Thanks for the comment, we had thought of republishing also. Perhaps Little Mathematics Library comes to mind first due to the smaller number of pages. But it got stalled due to other commitments that I had. But we are surely looking in this direction as well.

Thanks for responding and Appreciate all your hard work on this. This knowledge needs to be saved for posterity.

Just thinking aloud, why not approach the Russian publishing houses (and maybe the Russian govt. itself?) to get behind this and fund it? Or maybe a tie-up with well-known technical book publishers like Oxford/Cambridge publishing (i myself am partial to Dover Publications) to start a line under "Mir Titles"? A few professors to edit out the obvious propaganda material and everything should be good for mass market. I sense a good business opportunity here :-)