Cohousing-L Mailing List: Nothing in Russian

[Michael Shestero (shestero]

Dear remote cohousers,

I've got a curious and sad fact: no any literature by topic "cohousing" are 
ever directly accessible in Russia (nor in the countries around). That nothing 
(neither books nor articles) were translated into Russian I was aware before; 
but there are no original issues either. During last week I attend the Library 
of Foreign Literature and Central State Library (former "Leninka") with the 
list of titles including:

1. McCamant, Kathryn. Cohousing : a contemporary approach to housing ourselves.

2. Janelle Orsi and Emily Doskow. The Sharing Solution How to Save Money, 
Simplify Your Life, and Build Community.

3. Eric Raimy. Shared Houses, Shared Lives: the New Extended Families and How 
they Work.

4. Diane Leaf Chrisitan. Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow 
Ecovillages and Intentional Communities.

5. Kelty,...      Cohousing : building intentional community.

6. Lori Stephens.      House Mates: A Guide to Cooperative Shared Housing. 

7. Peter Jan Honigsberg, Bernard Kamoroff, Jim Beatty.          We Own It: 
Starting & Managing Coops, Collectives & Employee-Owned Ventures.

...and many others from the list of reference compiled by by Fred H Olson 
(http://l.cohousing.org/coho-lib.txt).

And not a single book was found! Finally I made requests to the international 
worldwide catalog and looks like there are no such books in all libraries not 
only Russian Federation but neighborhood states.

So, I guess wistfully, there are only two ways to obtain those books here:

1.      To buy at Amazon (some are sold there). But that (for Russia) means 
headache with payment; the shipping into here upraises costs twice and I should 
wait most likely several months. Amazon don't like to ship here and reduced 
many options, for instance I cannot buy a used/bargain book. I shall have also 
some risk: sometimes such parcels are lost.

2.      A person here can order a book through the interlibrary exchange. But 
this methods may cost even more money than buying it in Amazon and may last 
several weeks, too.

Because of this matter of things I decided to address into Cohousing-L (and I 
suppose some authors of the books are here and reading this my appeal) with 
following:

1.      Isn't it too impudent to ask if somebody presents a book or few of them 
to the Central State Library in Moscow or the Library of Foreign Languages in 
Moscow?

2.      What do authors or related personas think about a possibilities and 
expediencies of translating some of the books and Russian. Technically it is 
easy. Note that this means possibility to sale them not only in Russia, but all 
around the exUSSR countries and Eastern Europe.

3.      May be some may help to make English editions more accessible here (for 
example in local e-shops). This means really much more easiness in buying. The 
leading e-bookshop here is ozon.ru and the only related item "The Cohousing 
Handbook : Building a Place for Community" by Hanson and others are in the 
catalog there (yet not in the store!).

Thanks for your attention,

Michael Shestero / Moscow / shestero.info, cohousing.ru