12 October 2012

Top low-cost genealogy Ebooks

If you have an Ereader, and 25% of North Americans do according to recent statistics, you'll have noticed the phenomenon of low cost Ebooks. Let's have a look at the five top ranked genealogy titles at less than $5 in the Kindle store according to their stats. To be included here they each had to have a sales rank better than 100,000 or rating greater than 3.5. I only included titles with two or more ratings.

The table is ordered by price. Notice there's no apparent correlation between price, rating, number of pages or sales rank. Sales rank swings wildly; the figure in the table was found on the evening on Wednesday 10 October - it's likely considerably different now!

Title
Author
Price
Rating (out of 5)
Pages
Publication date
Sales Rank
Rochelle Reben, Beth Jane Reben
$.99

5
52
Aug 15, 2011

94,068
Mark W Swarthout

$1.29

3.5

42

Jul 30, 2012

98,421

Nancy Hendrickson

$2.99
3.6
50
Mar 10, 2011

47,270

Nancy Hendrickson
$2.99

2.8

25

Jun 23, 2010

99,644

M. D. Healy

$4.99

5
66
Dec 31, 2011

224,332

Click the book title to find out more.

With the exception of the Irish book these are all US-oriented although with considerable content more widely applicable.

Two books on this list are authored by Nancy Hendrickson, a contributing editor of the (US) Family Tree Magazine. According to her web-site her books are repurposed from the many magazine articles previously published. She has 13 titles in all, 10 of which relate to history or family history. Only one sells for over $5.

There are no British or Canadian books on the list.

British introductory genealogy is served by Branching Out: How To Research Your Family's History by Simon Fowler priced at $2.99. It will get you going, an introduction leading to his Family History: Digging Deeper also in a Kindle version at $13.12.

There's no introductory Canadian genealogy book - an opportunity for some enterprising Canadian genealogist-writer. The specialist Researching Canadian Soldiers of the First World War by Michael O'Leary looks interesting at 221 pages selling for only $1.99

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