To Our Customers: The Perils of a North American Publisher lead to a Major Drop in Price and an Opportunity for You

John Grenham, whose book we have excerpted in the previous article, is considered to be the leading authority on Irish genealogy. Genealogical.com has been proud to publish the North American version of each edition of John’s book, including the just released Fifth Edition.

Tracing Your Irish Ancestors is a UK publication which we license to print and sell in the US. Now with a combination of favorably negotiated postage rates plus low cost exposure on Amazon, some UK distributors are able to use an opening in the Copyright laws to sell into the U.S. market at extremely low margins. At least one of these companies is even owned by Amazon.com. 

As a publisher, we have obligations to authors and a number of expenses that book distributors do not have. In the future, we will likely find it impossible to license UK and other foreign publications. In the long run, this can only increase the monopolistic power of Amazon while discouraging authors and publishers.

To make the best of this situation, we have decided to first drop our price on the paperback edition of Mr. Grenham’s book and then replace it with a hard cover edition that we expect to have available by early August. We’ll take the hit on the paperback edition, and then give you a superior product at a competitive price. For you, we’re making this a win-win arrangement that we invite you to take advantage of. We’d be grateful for your support.

Look for our announcement in a future issue of “Genealogy Pointers.”