Who is the publisher, really? And which publication location?

Dear EE,

I'm working on a citation for information I am using from the Kindle copy of the 50th Anniversary Edition book Genealogy Standards by the BCG. The copyright and publisher information at location 3 reads as follows:

Copyright © 2014
Board for Certification of Genealogists
P. O. Box 14291
Washington, D.C. 20044

Office@BCGcertification.org

Published by Ancestry.com,
an imprint of Turner Publishing Company

424 Church Street • Suite 2240 • Nashville, Tennessee 37219

445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor • New York, New York 10022

 

I am unclear on whether this book's publisher is Ancestry.com or Turner Publishing Company. Ancestry.com makes sense to me, as the actual text of the page does say, "Published by Ancestry.com," but then the technicalities of getting the Kindle book published may have then been performed by TPC? That's a question -- as in, I ponder the level of significance of TPC as it pertains to our source information.

Additionally, which location do I use? Because neither Nashville nor New York are addresses for Ancestry. If Ancestry.com is the publisher, then [Salt Lake City, Utah] would be the proper publisher information, would it not? Or simply n.p. in the publisher's location information?

Sigh,

Eevande
Lost in a Kindle Book Rabbit Hole

Submitted byEEon Fri, 01/05/2018 - 10:59

Eevande, to distill the problem down to the basic issue: What is meant by that publishing term "imprint"?

As you may know, Turner Publishing Company bought out the book-publishing division of Ancestry.com.  All the books previously put into print by Ancestry, and still in stock, naturally carry Ancestry's name as publisher on the title page. As a result, people who order those books from Turner Publishing would be confused by Ancestry's name, if Turner's advertising did not in some way acknowledge the situation.

In cases such as this (and it happens with a lot of publishing houses that buy out "boutique" publishers) is to identify the original publisher's collection as an "imprint" of the larger publishing house.

The standard way of handling this in a citation would be, in the publisher's field, to say

"Ancestry Imprint, Turner Publishing Co.

With regard to how we cite publication place when a publisher has more than one location, see  EE 12.16 "Places of Publication, Multiple."

Given that you're one to closely analyze what you have, you may notice that the 50th anniversary edition of BCG's Standards Manual (which carries a different title from the first edition) was published some years after Turner bought out Ancestry. The new version was not published by Ancestry itself. However, Ancestry published the Board's first standards manual in 2001; after Turner's buy-out, it kept that book in print under its new Ancestry imprint. When a radically new book was prepared by the Board in 2014, it went back to the same publisher and together they decided to keep the new book under the same imprint rather than to issue it under Turner's standard ID.

Submitted byeevandeon Fri, 01/05/2018 - 11:27

Editor,

That makes much more sense. I was either not aware of Turner Publishing Company's buying the book publishing division of Ancestry, or if I was, I didn't remember. I honestly was surprised to see that Genealogy Standards had been published by Ancestry rather than by the BCG itself, as I thought the BCG self-published. But that's neither here nor there for this discussion.

Based on what you said, then, I'd do this for a full reference note:

 

23. Board for Certification of Genealogists, Genealogy Standards 50th Anniversary Edition, Kindle edition, (Nashville, Tennessee: Ancestry Imprint, Turner Publishing Co., 2014), location 253.

 

I chose Nashville simply because it was the first location listed, and will put both Nashville and New York in my source list.

Incidentally, is there a reason that the Board decided to keep it under the imprint rather than switch it to the standard Turner ID?

Eevande

P.S. Thank you for the compliment.

 

Submitted byEEon Sat, 01/06/2018 - 11:47

Eevande, the certification board is not a book publisher. It did in-house printing of its own free roster and application guide, before it began posting both online. But the Standards Manual (either edition) is not an "in-house" guide for applicants. It's a codification of field-wide standards that have long prevailed but had never been gathered into print. Ancestry published it in the same manner that it published other guides to research and writing.

One tweak of the draft citation you've posted. "Fiftieth Anniversary Edition" is not part of the manual's title and should not be italicized as though it were part of the title. As you'll note from all the book examples in EE's chapter 12, the words that identify an edition are never italicized.  (This is standard across all citation styles from CMOS to MLA to AP and others.)

Submitted byeevandeon Sat, 01/06/2018 - 11:55

Editor,

I went back and forth with that and settled on the wrong title or edition answer.

Thanks.

Eevande