Pravkniga.ru

» see pravkniga.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Pravkniga.ru described itself as an internet portal devoted to Orthodox book publishing in Russian, which undersells it. What it was building was a union bibliography of a whole religious publishing industry, assembled by two of the publishers inside that industry, and handed over at no charge.

Georgy Mikhailovich Gupalo, general director and editor-in-chief of the Dar publishing house, started it in 2006. Konstantin Vasilyevich Chechenev, running Bely Gorod, backed it. The stated goal was to preserve information about every Orthodox book published in Russia during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and then to tell readers what was newly out. There was a third goal listed, which was to protect believers from what the site called a flood of pseudo-Orthodox literature, and that is the giveaway that this was a project with a position rather than just a database.

It worked. At its fullest the catalog held descriptions of more than 13,000 editions, over 1,000 publishers, and close to 900 libraries. Every one of those records was contributed and published on a non-commercial basis. The site sat in the top ten most-visited properties of the Orthodox Russian internet, which for a bibliography rather than a news site or a forum is unusual placement.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a catalog is for ~

Orthodox publishing in Russia is about as far from where I have ever been as a subject can get, in language and in faith both, and I am reading it the way anyone reads a library catalog for a collection they will never visit. What carries across is the shape of the work. Somebody decided that a category of book deserved a complete, searchable, public record, and then did the tedious part for six years without charging for it.

That model was normal on the early web and has become rare. Directories and bibliographies were built by people close enough to a subject to know what belonged in it, and the funding was whatever the builders could absorb. It holds up while one enthusiast keeps caring. It has no defense at all against the day a domain becomes more useful as a storefront.

~ the address changed hands ~

The Russian Wikipedia entry puts it with unusual precision: in 2012 the site ceased to exist with the content described, and at its address there is now another site, an online store. That is exactly what you find today. Typing pravkniga.ru into a browser returns a page titled Internet-magazin Bely Gorod, with Dar in brackets after it, selling the catalog of the two publishing houses that had built the free catalog.

So neither publisher went under and nobody lost the brand. The name and the domain both survived. What stopped was the part that served everybody else in the trade, the thousand other publishers and the nine hundred libraries, and there is no dated announcement anywhere explaining when the decision was taken or why.

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