My hope is that someday every chess book ever published will be available legally for a small subscription fee (like the chess equivalent of Scribd). Until then, VK remains a flawed, fascinating, and invaluable resource.

If you have ever searched for an out-of-print chess classic—like Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual (first edition), Polugaevsky’s Grandmaster Preparation , or the legendary Soviet School of Chess —you know the problem: physical copies cost hundreds of dollars, and legal eBooks often don’t exist.

VK is a social media platform (think Facebook + YouTube + Reddit, but Russian). Within VK, thousands of “public pages” (communities) are dedicated solely to sharing scanned chess books in PDF, DJVU, and CBV formats.

Why thousands of players are turning to VK for free, scanned classics—and how you can do it safely.