Welcome to the New Genealogical.com!

If you find change upsetting, this Post is for you

Back on February, 7th, 2018, we launched our new website — without fanfare. If you are a regular reader of our Genealogical Pointers newsletter, you know that Genealogical.com has a new home, along with lots of breakdowns. Our goal is to create a site that supports you, our customers, in ways that are important to you. To accomplish this, we’ll need to hear from you in ways other than by what you purchase. We’ve set up the Comments feature of our Blog (below!) as a way for you to tell us what is working and not working for you. (If we post your comments, we won’t use names.) After 65 years of publishing, we’re re-inventing our business, and we invite you to join us in the venture.

First, however, we must confess that we launched the new site somewhat prematurely. Our website developers were continuing to de-bug the new site when, out of the blue, our old site crashed. The new site has had its moments: slow page loading, occasional error messages, and a most annoying web page overload that can stop everything, not to mention broken links from sites all over the web. Amid all the breakdowns, at least our credit card processing has not been affected. Our processor, Stripe, provides you with a solid and safe platform.

Now let’s highlight a few features of the new website that you may not be fully familiar with.

We’ve combined our eBooks with our Print Books so you can choose between formats. We are offering subscriptions to groups of our eBook titles so you can have a library of your own using our web reader, at affordable prices. We’re also combining series titles (both print and eBook) into packages we can offer at a savings.

All the new features would be useless if you could not find a book that you’re looking for. That’s not a problem if you have a specific title in mind. But for the rest, we can’t expect you to inspect over 2,000 books; and we don’t have the resources to build an every word database of all our titles. Even if we did, you’d miss out finding things you don’t know you don’t know- one reason books continue to endure. What we can do is give you tools to reduce the number of possible titles to a workable number (less than 10) which you can then explore or, if an eBook, search inside. See our Video on How to Search for Books and eBooks.

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Can you say more about the books, Bundles and Subscriptions?

When you purchase one of our e-books, you can choose to download it in one of the formats offered and read it on your own devices, or access it online where a copy will remain in your personal account at our new site. Because they do not incur printing or shipping costs, e-books are always priced lower than their print counterparts.

The Print and E-book Bundle category refers to a select group of multi-volume titles. These may be Sets or a Series of related titles. Our bundles have been priced to offer customers greater savings over the purchase of the individual volumes. Check out, for examples of sets, the Compendium of American Genealogy, or the Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy; or a series like Scottish Settlers in North America, 1625-1825 where a print set has the newest volume not yet available as an eBook.

As with individual e-books, when you purchase a bundle, you can download the files and/or use them on our web reader. Unlike the previous two categories, the Subscription category gives you online access to one or more of our large special collections for an affordable fee. For example, you can subscribe to our Irish and America collection of 42 books, and search over $1,000 worth of Irish how-to and Irish immigration books (print value) for merely $10/month, or $100/year.  Our how-to subscriptions, Genealogy at a Glance and Getting Started with Genealogy, for example, are excellent choices for users of e-books since you will want to read them at your leisure.

We’re designing the subscription groupings as perhaps the best way to give you access to so many books in one place and at the same time. Once you have finished using them for a particular phase of your research, you can move on to another area. Right now there are four subscription groupings offered; however, we will be adding to them on a regular basis.

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One More Thing

The biggest complaint we’re getting from our staff is that a customer must open an account before adding titles to their cart. Many shoppers like to purchase as a “Guest” rather than provide any personal information. We currently do not provide for that. Many also prefer to add to their cart and come back to make choices.  You can do that as long as your first open your account. While we may include such a change as we go forward, there are a couple of things we want you to know so you can be comfortable using our site. They are all neatly summarized in our FAQ Creating an Account is Easy and Comes with Benefits.

We will be announcing several major new reference books on Genealogical.com in the next month or two, and we are sure you will want to know about as well. So please bookmark the new site and look for new announcements and improvements in the weeks to come.  Thanks again for your patience.

 

 

Have questions or comments about the freshly re-designed Genealogical.com? Please provide them in the comments section below!