Russian Publishing System: From Printed Samizdat to Electronic Self-Publishing

The proliferation of unofficial, informal publications has accompanied mankind since the emergence of book culture. The reasons for this could be either a desire to circumvent censorship restrictions or a lack of need for a wide audience or official publication status. Terms such as “amateur book publishing”, “samizdat” and “self-publishing” are used to describe this process and its result. Amateur publishing, synonymous with non-professional publishing, can be aimed at both the creative realization of the author and the dissemination of works of artistic or ideological value that are important to him. “Samizdat” is a concept belonging to the Soviet period of history, a phenomenon of “second culture” that coexisted with official culture on an unofficial, uncensored level. In the modern period of our country’s history samizdat has been replaced by self-publishing. It is distinguished by less ideologized and maximum individualization of the product. Self-published authors publish works in small editions, often in a single copy. The motivation of the authors and the themes of these works are as diverse as possible. It should be noted that most of the works are of an entertainment nature. Electronic book publishing is actively growing. Technologies allow copying and generating textual and visual content, giving authors the possibility to use available templates and products of automated software work. Thanks to the development of printing technologies and the spread of the Internet, self-publishing is converging with official book publishing. If in the Soviet period samizdat and official book publishing practically did not overlap, today the situation has changed. Large book services, such as Litres and Ridero, speed up and simplify the process of proofreading, layout and design of editions, as well as provide the possibility of ISBN registration. Thus, the distance between official and unofficial, informal book publishing is shrinking.