Strong Updates Vol­ume I, the Jede­diah line, has been out of print for more than 5 years. This is the line which we pub­lished first, over 20 years ago. This is the line which has pos­si­bly has the most inter­est — it’s the first book that sold out.

When the Jede­diah Book was pub­lished back in 1989, it gen­er­ated a wealth of new mate­r­ial. Peo­ple bought the book, read the book, and sub­mit­ted even more genealog­i­cal infor­ma­tion to the Strong Fam­ily Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica. We have been gath­er­ing and edit­ing that infor­ma­tion for decades — but it has never been pub­lished, until now.

It’s never really been prac­ti­cal to con­sider pub­lish­ing sec­ond edi­tions of our Updates books as new print edi­tions. The up-front costs are pro­hib­i­tive. The cur­rent trend is towards elec­tronic pub­lish­ing. Peo­ple read books on their kin­dles and nooks, and on their home computers.

It’s this fact which made a Sec­ond Edi­tion prac­ti­cal. We cre­ated the book as a pair of PDF files, which we have pack­aged on a great-looking CD which can be read by any mod­ern com­puter. The edi­to­r­ial and pro­duc­tion process has taken us nearly two years, and count­less hours.

I believe that every­one who has the orig­i­nal printed Jede­diah Book — no longer avail­able, at any price — will be very happy to pur­chase the Sec­ond Edi­tion. We have added lit­er­ally many hun­dreds of pages of updated information.

The Jede­diah Book, Sec­ond Edi­tion, is finally com­plete! Yay! We are cur­rently pack­ag­ing the book on CD. The book, on CD, will begin ship­ping on March 1, 2011.