Monday, November 5, 2007

Ancestry.com, BookSurge Partner On Family History Books

BookSurge, the on-demand publishing arm of online retailer Amazon.com, reported Monday that it has collaborated with genealogy Web site Ancestry.com to produce a series of family history books. BookSurge said the series, called "Our Name in History," comprises more than a quarter of a million volumes and will be sold on Amazon.com. BookSurge explained that the series details the most common 279,000 surnames in the United States and is based on historical records dating from the 1600s. To research the books, Ancestry.com studied more than 5 billion names from U.S. Census data, as well as immigration, birth, marriage, death, military and other historical records, BookSurge noted. BookSurge operates an on-demand, print-on-order book publishing service which publishes a book only when it has been ordered; the firm is owned by Amazon.com. BookSurge, also known as On-Demand Publishing LLC, is based in Charleston, S.C. Ancestry.com is headquartered in Provo, Utah.