The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

Publishing genealogy books has always been an expensive undertaking. Most genealogy books are self-published by the authors. That is, each author pays all the printing costs and then tries to recover his or her expenses by selling individual copies of the book. Publishing expenses typically run several thousand dollars, even tens of thousands if you wish to publish a lot of books. Then the author has to learn new business skills in order to warehouse and advertise the books, take orders, pack them, ship them, and keep track of all the finances. 

Of course, no genealogy book is ever really “finished.” Corrections and newly discovered information should be added, but that is difficult to do with printed volumes. I would also suggest that collaborative efforts are not well served by traditional printed books; many who buy the books could add supplemental information about extended relatives if there was a mechanism for doing so.

Of course, in this day and age we all know that books can be published online or on CD-ROM. In fact, the trend is obviously in that direction. Major genealogy book publishers are now publishing more and more CD-ROM disks or posting new books online. An author also can simply write the book in a word processor, as always, and then have the result converted by various software packages into HTML pages that are ready for uploading to a web server. Such information can be corrected easily, and newly-discovered information can be added at any time. The economics are simple: the printing cost of hundred of books is the equivalent of paying web server hosting fees for thousands of months. An online site makes your “book” available to millions around the globe, unlike printed books. 

Some web servers will even host your book free of charge although they will surround it with their paid advertising. Whatever web hosting service you select, the information in your online “book” is available to and easily searched by many more people than will ever see a printed genealogy book.

In the past few years, numerous genealogy books have been published in just this manner: the entire document is written in a word processor and is then uploaded and published on the web server as a static document. That is, the author creates the electronic version of a printed book. Others on the web can read it. However, I will suggest that there is even better technology available today. You can use this new technology to publish a book about your ancestors, the tax lists of your county, or the muster roll of a Civil War regiment. 

Unlike printed books and static web pages, you can allow others to easily contribute still more information to the publication that you create. In effect, your work becomes a living, breathing publication with a life of its own. Over time, it can be refined time and time again, providing an even better service to all future readers. The technology I am about to describe is inexpensive and easy to use, even for non-technical authors.

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