The causes of such predominance are quite clear. The denial of communist ideology formed a great demand in new books on history, philosophy, sociology, political sciences, law and especially on new disciplines for Russia marketing, economics and others. The relative fall of students interest for sciences, engineering at the beginning of 90-ties and the usefulness of Soviet textbooks for these disciplines did not encourage commercial publishers to go on with sciences. Two other subgroups of commercial publishers should also be singled out . They are publishers specialising in computing and in medical handbooks both professional and popular.
Digital publishing Coming digital era is felt by everybody in Russian publishing.
Our universities, academic institutes now have quite good telecommunications. Some publishing houses and firms from computer business started SD-ROM and multimedia publications. But this has not influenced STM publishing seriously. Many publishing houses have plans to develop digital publishing. But most of them consider such projects only as pilot for economic reasons.