Is it time to stop the presses?

It seems that every week I report in this newsletter about more and more genealogy books that are being converted to electronic format. Sure, old books have been digitized for several years now. However, even new books are now appearing as electronic publications. Some are published on CD-ROM disks but nowadays more and more old genealogy books are being loaded onto Internet web servers and being offered online on the World Wide Web, sometimes free of charge and in other cases they may be offered for a modest fee.

One example is the 6th Edition of The Genealogist's Address Book, by Elizabeth Petty Bentley, published some years ago by Genealogical Publishing Company. It is available electronically or as a traditional (paper) book. The first four editions of The Genealogist's Address Book were printed only on paper, but the economics caught up with reference books. Each new edition cost more and more to print. As prices escalated, sales decreased. Many people could not afford the higher prices. The latest 6th Edition with 799 pages now costs $83.50 for the paper version, but the electronic version costs only $46.95. I assume the electronic version  has sold more copies than has the paper version.

This is only one such example; there are many more. Is this an indication of the end of book publishing as we know it? Will simple economics drive printed books out of existence?

Many bibliophiles cringed when the Internet search engine Google announced plans to digitize the book collections of five major libraries. To be sure, there isn't as much personal "touch and feel" with an electronic version as there is with a printed version. I have read many comments about this, such as, "no one will ever want to read an entire novel on their computer screen," or, "online books will succeed only when every bathroom has a high-speed Internet connection!" I recently read another statement from a librarian: "There’s just a coziness with a book. The smell. Can you smell a laptop?"

I believe that librarian's view is a bit too simplistic. Very few people would suggest that all books should be printed forever on paper. In fact, I now own several full-length novels that are stored on my computer or on my Kindle (or in BOTH places!

For the rest of this article, let's divide the topic of books into two major categories: (1.) books that are meant to be read from cover to cover (such as a novel) and (2.) reference books that typically are only read in small segments at a time (such as an encyclopedia or many genealogy books).

While I love my Kindle, the state-of-the-art of such “electronic book readers” will obviously continue to improve. The computers and electronic "book readers" ten or twenty years from now probably will be wafer-thin, flexible screens the size of a piece of paper that you can roll up and stuff into a pocket or purse. They will produce no more glare than a piece of paper, perhaps even less. They will be easier to read than paper. They will operate on batteries that last for twenty, fifty, or even more hours before needing to be recharged. Today's "book readers" are already about the size of a paperback novel and weigh less than one pound. As technology continues to improve, they will become even smaller and lighter. Until that day arrives, however, nobody will want to read “War and Peace” on a computer screen while sunbathing at the beach.

Reference books are an entirely different matter. Encyclopedias, operators' manuals, and other reference materials are generally read only a few pages at a time. Such reference material seems to be much better suited for online distribution. The bulk of a computer and the screen glare do not seem like major issues when reading only a few pages. Indeed, online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Encarta have seen skyrocketing success even as printed reference books (Encyclopædia Britannica) produce reduced sales figures every year. Actually, since 2016, the Encyclopædia Britannica has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia.

The Internet Archive has even created greater success than has Google. Located at https://archive.org/, the Internet Archive is a non-profit online library containing millions of FREE books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. If you are not yet using the Internet Archive, you need to start NOW!

Think of all the genealogy books you have consulted. Aren't most of them reference books? Didn't you only consult a page or two, or maybe five or ten pages? How many genealogy books have you read from cover to cover? I bet it is very few. The Genealogists' Address Book is an excellent example: it is a reference book, and nobody will ever be spellbound by it as they read it from cover to cover.

The conversion of genealogy books to digital formats would seem to make sense, even for "War and Peace," "Gone with the Wind" or "The Da Vinci Code." 

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/13355250. (A Plus Edition password is required to access that article.)

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077. 

The following is an announcement written by TheGenealogist:

For the first time, you can now pin down your ancestors in 1851!

TheGenealogist’s latest release makes it easy to locate an ancestor geographically in the 1851 census. With a choice of historical and modern georeferenced maps, this welcome development makes it simple to explore the place where your ancestors lived and discover their surroundings.

Census records have always been a staple resource for family historians. With the particulars of the street or road name, researchers will often turn to a modern map to see if they can locate where their forebears lived. This, however, can be fraught with difficulties if the road name changed over the years or the area was redeveloped. Thus, TheGenealogist has been working through its census collection, linking the records to the detailed map collections on its Map Explorer™. 

The 1851 Census of Edinburgh linked to Map Explorer™ locating Howard Place, the family home of novelist Robert Louis Stevenson

• The 1851 census now joins the ranks of other key censuses (1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911, and the 1939 Register) already integrated with the innovative Map Explorer™.
  

• With just a click of a button, researchers can pin their forebears’ residences down to a parish, street or building and trace the routes they would have taken to visit local shops, pubs, churches, workplaces, and parks.
  
  

• Historical maps reveal the location of major roads and the nearest railway stations, shedding light on how our ancestors would have travelled to other parts of the country to work, visit relatives or their hometowns.

With this latest release, subscribers of TheGenealogist can now explore their ancestors’ neighbourhood in 1851, making it easier to uncover hidden stories and discover connections to family that lived nearby.

For those family historians on the move, TheGenealogist allows you to trace your forebears’ footprints while walking down modern streets using their “Locate me” feature. Imagine retracing your ancestors’ steps and discovering the places that they had frequented! 

When viewing a household record from the 1851 census on TheGenealogist, you’ll now see a map indicating where your ancestor was during the night of the census. Clicking on this map seamlessly loads the location in Map Explorer™, enabling you to explore the area.

Read TheGenealogist’s feature article where the 1851 census locates the Edinburgh house where a famous author was born:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_9no1saYEYdnYH0Z5Rt36SvXNTc-7xn1N3a7A3rw2cw/edit

Lifetime Discount Offer!

For a limited time, you can claim a Diamond Subscription to The Genealogist for just £89.95, a saving of £50! You’ll also receive a free Research Pack worth over £60.

To find out more and claim the offer, visit https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/MGBCEN524.

This offer comes with a Lifetime Discount, meaning you’ll pay the same discounted price every time your subscription renews.

This offer expires on 31st July 2024.

This offer includes a free research pack containing the following:-
- Subscription to Discover Your Ancestors Online Magazine (Worth £24.99)
- Researching and Locating Your Ancestors Book by Celia Heritage (Worth £9.95)
- Regional Research Guidebook by Andrew Chapman (Worth £9.95)
- Family Tree Chart (Folded)
- Birth Year from Census Date Calculator
- 10 Generation Relationship Calculator
- Ticket to The Family History Show - choose from York 2024, London 2024 or Online 2025

Total Savings: £113.24 - Save Over 55%

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections. 

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

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The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

This week there are over 58,556 new additions to check out.
There's no better way to connect with the lives of your ancestors than by finding them within our school and occupation records. This week we've updated our collection of Staffordshire school admission registers and our Scottish Occupations & Professions

 to make it easier than ever to glean fascinating insights. 

We've also added over 13,000 First World War records and 272,757 newspaper pages. 

National School Admission Registers & Log-books 1870-1914

We improved this set with new images spanning over 150 years. 

Shugborough Tunnel, Staffordshire Wikimedia Commons

Browse these new additions from Staffordshire today and find images you've never seen before.

Scotland, Occupations & Professions

There are 38,123 brand-new Scottish occupational records for you to discover. These unique new additions span back as far as the 17th century. 

British Rolls Of Honour and Nominal Rolls

We also added 13,948 new First World War records from Leicestershire and Rutland. 

The River Soar West of Cossington in Leicestershire - Wikimedia Commons

These transcriptions document wartime Honour and Nominal Rolls. 

Over 270,000 new pages to discover...

This week we added 272,757 new newspaper pages that's taken our total page count up to a huge 77 million - explore new additions from Blyth to Ballymena now.

New titles:

• Peterborough Evening Telegraph 1949-1965, 1967, 1987

Updated titles:

• Ballymena Weekly Telegraph 1990
• Banffshire Herald 1918
• Blyth News 1974-1981
• Bridlington Free Press 1987-1989
• Buchan Observer and East Aberdeenshire Advertiser 1985, 1987-1989, 1993
• Buckingham Advertiser and Free Press 1986
• Eastbourne Gazette 1994
• Fleetwood Weekly News 1999
• Gainsborough Evening News 1988
• Halifax Daily Guardian 1910, 1913-1914, 1918-1921
• Halifax Evening Courier 1966-1967, 1986
• Hemel Hempstead Gazette and West Herts Advertiser 1985, 1987, 1989
• Hucknall Dispatch 1984, 1997, 1999
• Lincolnshire Standard and Boston Guardian 1986
• Littlehampton Gazette 1982-1984, 1986, 1988-1989
• Retford, Worksop, Isle of Axholme and Gainsborough News 1986-1987, 1996
• Scarborough Evening News 2001

Join us on Friday at 4pm

For a very special Fridays Live, Findmypast’s research specialist Jen Baldwin is joined by Helen Antrobus, Assistant National Curator at the National Trust, to delve into the incredible stories unearthed during Findmypast’s collaboration with National Trust.

Last week, we added 30,587 brand new records - explore the full release for yourself today.

The Centre for Business History in Stockholm manages over 85,000 linear meters of historical material on behalf of Swedish companies. The parts of the archives that are digital, either scanned or born digital, are now made accessible via a “digital reading room,” a new web service available at arkivet.naringslivshistoria.se.

“For 50 years, we have provided materials to researchers in our physical reading rooms. Today, increasingly larger parts of the deposits we manage are digital, and these can now be searched directly from one’s computer or mobile,” says Anders Sjöman, head of client projects and communication at the Centre for Business History.

Companies that keep their archives at the Centre thereby gain even easier access to their materials. The same applies to researchers, who gain easier access to the archival materials they need for their research.

You can read more in an article by Anders Sjöman, VP for Communications at the Centre for Business History, at: https://bit.ly/4ae0YQm

The following is a press release written by the (U.S.) National Archives and Records Administration:

Millions of Historical Records Held by the National Archives to be Digitized and Made Accessible Through Public-Private Collaboration

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today announced a new multiyear agreement with Ancestry  to digitize, index, and publish tens of millions of historical United States records, previously unavailable online. 

“The National Archives is the nation’s record keeper, and we hold billions of stories in our collection. Our mission is to preserve, protect, and share those stories with all Americans,” said Dr. Colleen Shogan, Archivist of the United States. “Our collaboration with Ancestry is a great example of a public-private partnership. By working together, we will digitize millions of records from our holdings and make them available to the public.” 

Enlarge

Howard Hochhauser, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Ancestry, signs an official agreement with Dr. Colleen Shogan, Archivist of the United States, at a signing event at the National Archives Building on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, in Washington, DC. The signing marks the official agreement between Ancestry and the National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives photo by John Valceanu

The records to be digitized include U.S. military morning reports from World War II; Selective Service draft cards covering the post–World War II draft registration between 1948 and 1959; naturalization and immigration records held at the National Archives at San Francisco, CA; records held in San Francisco, CA, related to Asian Americans; and records held at the National Archives at Denver, CO, relating to Native Americans. The scope and depth of these records reflect the richness and diversity of America’s history.

Since 2008, the National Archives and Ancestry have collaborated to make important historical records more available to the public. The digitization of these records since the beginning of this collaboration and their availability through both the National Archives Catalog and the Ancestry platform help the public more easily find and access pieces of the nation’s, and their families’, history. 

Today, the Archivist of the United States and Howard Hochhauser, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Ancestry, officially signed an agreement to continue and expand the successful public-private collaboration. The new agreement documents the commitments by both the National Archives and Ancestry to digitize tens of millions of historical records. 

“We’re honored to take a leading role in preserving the story of America through this agreement with the National Archives,” said Hochhauser. “Given their role as the holder of the country’s largest and most distinguished collection of records, this collaboration reinforces Ancestry’s commitment to expand accessibility to historical records.” 

Additional collections and projects will be identified, agreed, and announced between the parties under this agreement. Records from Record Group 21, Military Petitions for Naturalization, 1918–1947, will be scanned beginning this month at the National Archives at San Francisco. 

Learn more about how the National Archives works with other organizations to digitize and make available National Archives holdings. A list of current digitization projects is online.

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About the National Archives

The National Archives and Records Administration is the nation's record keeper. It safeguards and manages the official records of the U.S. Government, ensuring the documentation of our nation's history. Online visitors can explore millions of digitized documents, photographs, films, and more in the National Archives Catalog at catalog.archives.gov. 

About Ancestry

Ancestry, the global leader in family history, empowers journeys of personal discovery to enrich lives. With its unparalleled collection of more than 60 billion records, over 3 million subscribers, and over 25 million people in its growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Over the past 40 years, Ancestry has built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen it as the platform for discovering, preserving, and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.

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The following is an excerpt from the MyHeritage Blog:

As the Queen of Pop Taylor Swift prepared to dazzle Paris and Lyon with her current Eras tour, our team did some research on Taylor’s family background and discovered that she is distantly related to King Louis XIV of France.

Their family connection dates back to aristocratic England in the 14th century, with their common ancestors being Michael de la Pole, second Earl of Suffolk, and his wife Katherine Stafford. Michael de la Pole was an English nobleman who supported Henry IV against Richard II during the late 14th century. In the 17th century, Taylor’s English ancestors left for the American colonies and settled in Massachusetts, before moving on to Pennsylvania a few generations later.

On Louis XIV’s side, the link is through an English noblewoman Margaret de la Pole, who married a count of Béarn (in Southwestern France) in the 15th century. Her great-granddaughter would become Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, and her granddaughter of the latter is none other than Marie de’ Medici, the paternal grandmother of the French King Louis XIV.

Louis XIV (1638–1715) is well known for building the magnificent Palace of Versailles.

Louis XIV’s parties at Versailles were spectacular. The king loved to dance, and as a young king he danced in front of the court dressed as the sun. In fact, he founded the French Royal Academy of Dance, predecessor of the Academy of the National Opera of Paris, which today trains the dancers of the Paris Opera. 

Music was constantly played at Versailles, and not just for dancing. Louis XIV loved not only listening to music, but also playing it. Did you know that he studied guitar with the best musicians of his time and that he loved singing while playing the guitar? Apparently it runs in the family!

Explore your own family connections on MyHeritage.com

DNA can be created in a laboratory environment. In fact, there is a business in creating and selling artificially-created DNA. Of course, there are also security concerns. If this technology falls into the wrong hands, all sorts of bad things could happen.

One company is now offering a service to double-check synthesized DNA. SecureDNA is a new company based in Switzerland that offers a "free, cryptographically secure, and verifiably up-to-date system to screen all DNA synthesis for potential hazards."

Here is some information about the services that SecureDNA offers as copied from the company's web site:

"We offer fast, free synthesis screening you can trust.

"SecureDNA was designed to screen all oligo and gene synthesis orders against an up-to-date list of known and emerging hazards, including pre-generated functional variants.

"Universal - fast, free, and available to all. Non-profit and free to use, thanks to several generous donations and our efficient exact-match algorithm.

"The SecureDNA team is composed of academic life scientists and cryptographers, policy analysts, information security specialists, and software engineers from many nations. They came together in 2019 to build a system capable of secure and universal DNA synthesis screening that would be suitable for stepwise or complete implementation by industry stakeholders.

"We are grateful for support from the Open Philanthropy Project to team members at MIT, Aarhus University, and Northeastern University, and to an anonymous Chinese philanthropist for a donation to team members at Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

"We expect new U.S. regulation to mandate rigorous DNA synthesis screening, alongside potential regulation elsewhere.

"An engineered pandemic could be far worse than COVID-19. Rigorous screening protects humanity against this risk.

"The SecureDNA system uses a novel exact-match search algorithm that finds matches to hazards and functional equivalents. It does this by generating the set of all hazard subsequences of a predefined length, choosing some to defend quasi-randomly, then using algorithms to generate millions of functionally equivalent subsequences of each. These are subjected to reverse screening by comparing them to existing sequence databases in order to remove any that match known non-hazardous entries.

"The reverse screening step virtually eliminates false positives, the inclusion of quasi-random functional variants prevents adversaries from redesigning or mutating the hazard to evade screening, and searching for 30 base pair subsequences makes it very difficult to assemble hazards from oligonucleotides that are too small to be screened using other methods.

"Because exact-match screening is computationally efficient, we can apply oblivious multi-party cryptography to protect the confidentiality of both orders and the hazard database. Using this scheme, each possible subsequence of an order to be screened is turned into a unique cryptographic hash, and each such hash is then looked up in the database of hazards.

"This hash requires multiple separate machines to compute, meaning that even an attacker who could eavesdrop on network traffic or compromise a subset of computers in the screening system could not learn the plaintext of a customer order, and not even SecureDNA itself ever receives the customer’s DNA sequences—they remain safely on-premises at a provider or within the hardware of a benchtop synthesizer.

"Screening for hazardous DNA sequences is provided as a free service by the SecureDNA Foundation, an independent nonprofit foundation in the sense of Article 80 et seqq. Swiss Civil Code with legal seat in Zug, Switzerland. The purpose of the Foundation is to develop, maintain, administrate, distribute, and encourage the universal adoption of software for screening nucleic acid sequences. The Foundation may support any action intended to prevent nucleic acids from being used to cause harm."

"COVID-19 took over 20 million lives. That's over 10x more than if a nuclear warhead detonated in a major city. And future pandemics could be far worse.

"Custom DNA is essential to biotechnology - and a healthy, sustainable future. But in the wrong hands, it could do great harm. Only authorized researchers should be able to obtain DNA permitting them to assemble pandemic-capable agents.

"SecureDNA is a free, non-profit screening platform designed to safeguard DNA synthesis everywhere."

You can learn a lot more on the SecureDNA web site at: https://securedna.org.

Librarians' nationwide struggle against excessive e-book prices has had little success. Even after short legislative successes, publishers' tight renewal and loan rules keep e-book prices high, limiting libraries' selection of popular titles and frustrating customers. According to Axios, publishers often mandate libraries renew e-book licenses every two years or after 26 lending, which they find unreasonably costly. This limits the quantity of e-books they can lend out, especially bestsellers, which angers and confuses customers. The leading OverDrive-run Libby and hoopla applications, which let readers borrow innumerable e-books and audiobooks for free, are popular. Some libraries believe OverDrive and hoopla contracts are too expensive, so they're deleting the apps, especially hoopla.

You can read more in an article published in the Axios web site at: https://www.axios.com/2024/05/06/library-librarians-e-books-license-policies.

Every week, Sun Kai engages in a video conference with his mother. He candidly discusses his career, the challenges he encounters as a middle-aged individual, and thoughts that he refrains from sharing with his spouse. Occasionally, his mother will offer a remark, such as reminding him to look after his well-being, given he is her sole offspring. However, primarily, she predominantly engages in the act of listening. That is due to the fact that Sun's mother passed away five years ago. Furthermore, the individual with whom he is conversing is not a human being, but rather a digital clone that he has created of her - a dynamic visual representation capable of engaging in rudimentary dialogues. They have engaged in conversation for several years. Following her untimely demise in 2019, Sun sought to discover a means of perpetuating their connection. Therefore, he sought assistance from a group of professionals at Silicon Intelligence, an artificial intelligence (AI) firm located in Nanjing, China, which he helped establish in 2017. He furnished them with a photograph of her and many audio excerpts from their WeChat dialogues. Although the company primarily concentrated on audio generation, the employees dedicated four months to investigating synthetic methods and successfully created an avatar using the data provided by Sun. Subsequently, he gained the capability to visually perceive and engage in conversation with a virtual representation of his mother through a mobile application.

"Although my mom didn't appear authentic, I still managed to hear her frequently uttered words: 'Have you consumed a meal?'" 

Due to the early stage of development of generative AI, the clone of his mother is only capable of uttering a limited number of pre-determined phrases. However, Sun Kai asserts that this is consistent with her natural demeanor. "She would incessantly reiterate those inquiries, causing me profound emotional distress upon hearing them," he states. There is a considerable number of individuals, similar to Sun, who desire to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) in order to conserve, enliven, and engage with deceased loved ones as they grieve and seek solace. In China, the market for these technologies is thriving, with several companies already providing them and a significant number of individuals having already made payments for their use. Indeed, avatars are the most recent embodiment of a cultural practice: throughout history, Chinese individuals have consistently found comfort in seeking counsel from deceased individuals.

Although not flawless, the technology for avatars is advancing and getting more refined, with an increasing number of tools being offered by various companies. Consequently, the cost of reviving an individual, commonly referred to as achieving "digital immortality" in the Chinese sector, has experienced a substantial decrease. Now, this technology is becoming readily available to the entire population. There is skepticism among certain individuals regarding the therapeutic value of engaging with AI duplicates of deceased individuals, and the legal and ethical consequences of this technology remain uncertain. Currently, the concept continues to evoke discomfort among a significant number of individuals. However, according to Sima Huapeng, the CEO and co-founder of Silicon Intelligence, even if only a small fraction, such as 1%, of the Chinese population is willing to embrace the concept of AI cloning of deceased individuals, it would still represent a significant market.

You can read more in an article written by Zeyi Yang published in the technologyreview.com web site at: https://bit.ly/3JPXwAK.

Many of the articles in this newsletter refer to “the cloud.” Feedback from several newsletter readers indicates that not everyone understands what a "cloud" is in the Internet world. I thought I would publish this introduction to cloud computing and also explain how cloud computing is used to provide digital images of census records to millions of online genealogists.

A number of companies provide cloud computing services, including Amazon Web Services (often referred to as "AWS"), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Rackspace, pCloud, Red Hat (later acquired by IBM), Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, and several others. To keep things simple, I will describe Amazon simply because it is the largest cloud services provider and is the one that I use the most. However, I believe the other cloud service providers are all similar in operation. 

Amazon Web Services and most of the other cloud providers offer a number of services, including file storage, bulk email services, or running programs in the large cloud servers. Again, I will focus on file storage services because that is both the most popular cloud-based service and also the one that genealogists use the most. If I receive enough requests, I will describe other cloud-based services in future articles.

Amazon? I thought that was an online retailer!

Yes, this is the same Amazon that is well known as a huge online retailer. Amazon started in business as an online bookstore but has since expanded into selling all sorts of retail products. The company had to build huge data centers in order to handle the workload of its own retail customers. In effect, Amazon first created its own “cloud” for internal company use. Any number of computers in their data centers could be brought into action to “serve” data, applications, or both to Amazon customers. Whenever there was a lot of activity, more of these “servers” could be added to accommodate the volume of applications and data being accessed, moved around, or stored. When the workload was lighter, some of those servers could be returned to their standby status until the next surge of activity or could be redirected to other uses. Systems administrators would monitor the needs and ensure the required servers were active at any given time. The customers accessing the servers never knew which computer in which data center was handling their work; they had no need to know. It was as though their activity moved from the computer in front of them, off to a cloud that would send their information to its destination via routes and patterns that nobody had to know or navigate. All this happened instantaneously and reliably, whether there were a handful of users, hundreds, or thousands.

Eventually, Amazon's senior management realized that the company had developed facilities and expertise that corporate customers and individuals could also use. A few years ago Amazon capitalized on this idea by creating a new division called Amazon Web Services. The company expanded its data centers and started offering services to corporations and even to private individuals around the world. In effect, Amazon Web Services is in the “rent a server” and “rent some disk space” business. Computing power and storage space is available for both short-term and long-term rentals.

Amazon now has several data centers in many different locations, including Northern California, Northern Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Ireland, Tokyo, Sao Paulo (Brazil), and Singapore, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, and numerous other locations. The list is expanding as Amazon continues building even more data centers.  You can even view a PowerPoint slide presentation that describes the data centers in detail, created by Amazon Engineer James Hamilton at http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesHamilton_AmazonOpenHouse20110607.pdf. That slide show is several years old but the information within it appears to still be correct except that today there are more of these AWS data centers than ever before. 

Handling the storage and transfer of all that customer data requires Amazon to keep that data safe, as well as to allow users to access it on demand. This is more complex than simply keeping multiple copies in multiple locations; it also entails the maintenance of processes and applications around the world, a function commonly called “redundancy.” Redundancy is achieved as data at any one data center is copied to other data centers in other locations. In case of a major disaster (fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, network outages, etc.), any Amazon data center that goes offline quickly has its workload assumed by other Amazon data centers in other parts of the world. In most cases, such outages are invisible to users. 

Nothing is ever 100% perfect, but Amazon's uptime (availability) has always been better than 99.999999999% of the time, even when entire data centers have been shut down. One example is the Tokyo data center, when a magnitude 9 earthquake hit Japan on April 11, 2011. The Tokyo data center was new at the time and only partially in use. It was knocked out of operation within seconds when the earthquake occurred. However, all data, programs, and web services being supplied by the Tokyo data center were moved to data centers in other parts of the world within minutes. In most cases, end users did not encounter any outages or inconveniences. Most end users remained unaware of any problem in one Amazon data center.

Anyone can use the servers in Amazon's data centers and pay only for the amount of disk storage, high-speed connections, and processing power consumed. Amazon's customers include large corporations, small businesses, government agencies, and private individuals. In fact, even you can use Amazon's Web services. All you need is a credit card and a few minutes of time to create an account. I have an account and make backups several times a day from my laptop and desktop computers to Amazon's S3 service, as do hundreds of thousands of other computer users all over the world. All data is protected off-site and is available to the person who uploaded it wherever the person might be, at home, at work, or while traveling. You could do the same, should you wish to do so. 

In many cases, using Amazon's hardware, data centers, and support personnel is more cost-effective than buying one's own hardware and hiring people. The cost savings can be especially important when the need for such services exists for only a few days or weeks. It also works well when a person or a company has modest needs: if you need to store a limited amount of data or need only a single or a few web servers, you probably will find cloud computing to be much cheaper than purchasing one's own servers and building a data center. 

Amazon also provides very high security for all the data it stores. In fact, most security experts consider data stored on Amazon's cloud servers to be more secure than storing the same data in home computers, where data is vulnerable to attacks from the Internet as well as to visitors.

Amazon Web Services can be used for almost any Internet-based purpose: web servers, mail servers, disk storage space, backup of data and processes, running almost any sort of application, or even for displaying images of a census. Many well-known services use Amazon's cloud-based services, including Netflix (with thousands of movies stored in Amazon's disk space and available for downloads). See https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/ for more information). Several genealogy societies, including the New England Historic Genealogical Society, use Amazon's web servers and disk storage instead of buying and staffing their own servers and data centers. The financial savings often are significant.

Do you have one of Amazon’s Echo devices? If so, every time you start by saying, “Alexa…,” you are communication with Amazon Web Services (AWS)! All the computing and ll the data resides within Amazon Web Services. The device in your home or automobile simply serves as a remote terminal that is connected to Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Web Services (usually called AWS) actually is a collection of several related Internet services. The better-known services include those described below:

Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)

EC2, in its simplest form, is a collection of virtual machines. Instead of running computers in a company's own data center or at an individual's home, the computers are physically located in Amazon's data centers with constant backups being made to servers in other data centers. Each Amazon server can run Linux or Windows, and servers can be linked together. In fact, additional servers can be brought online and made operational within minutes, if needed. When the need goes away, the extra servers can be taken offline, disk drives erased, and the no-longer-needed servers then become available to other Amazon customers.

Control of the applications, the adding of servers, the reduction in servers, and other system administration tasks can all be controlled by systems administrators of Amazon customers who may be located thousands of miles from the data centers. Physical access to the computers being used is not required. In fact, Amazon's servers typically run in huge rooms with the lights turned off to save electricity.

In most cases, Amazon employees are not involved in installing or running the application activities; the customers' systems administrators perform administrative chores from their own offices, from their own homes, or even while riding a commuter train. The physical location of people and the physical location of servers both are irrelevant in cloud computing. 

Elastic Cloud Compute simply means that any application can be “stretched” – like an elastic band – to run on more than one server, even on thousands of servers, as needed. 

To be sure, adding web servers is not an instantaneous process. Data and programs do have to be copied to the new servers. However, the time required is measured in minutes, not in days or months as would happen with the old-fashioned method of ordering new servers from a manufacturer, waiting for delivery, and then mounting those servers into racks in a privately-owned data center. Using cloud computing, any company can add thousands of web servers within minutes to handle the load.

This is the elastic in Elastic Cloud Compute: systems administrators can “stretch” computing power to fit the need. As the load decreases in the future, servers can be removed from the application,  thereby “shrinking” the required hardware. Servers are available with different levels of storage and computing power. To measure customers' usage, Amazon refers to each virtual server as an “instance.” Each Micro instance, for example, only comes with 613 megabytes of RAM memory, while Extra Large instances can go up to 15 gigabytes. There are also other configurations for various processing needs.

Finally, Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances can be deployed across multiple geographic locations of Amazon's data centers. Deploying multiple servers in different locations around the world increases redundancy and reduces latency (the delay before the screen changes after you click the mouse).

Elastic Load Balance (ELB)

Load balancing is simply a fancy term meaning to “share the load equally.” If you have 1,000 servers running one application, the systems need to have the load distributed equally amongst all those servers. After all, it wouldn't be productive to have 500 idle servers plus 500 overloaded servers!

All the larger data centers practice load balancing. Amazon uses its own load balancing, called ELB, to balance the load amongst all its servers being used together on one application, even if those servers are in different data centers around the world. Here again, the elasticity of the operation simply means that administrators can stretch or shrink the workload to keep the distribution in balance.

Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Simple Storage Service (S3)

Block storage is essentially the same thing as disk storage. Amazon uses two versions: Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for operating systems and for storing applications and Simple Storage Service (S3) for storing data. In both cases, you can think of block storage as the equivalent of a hard drive in your computer. It operates in much the same manner.

Files uploaded to S3 are referred to as objects, which are then stored in buckets. S3 storage is scalable, which means that the only limit on storage is the amount of money you have to pay for it. Amazon has petabytes available (one petabyte is equal to 1,000,000,000 megabytes). S3 storage is automatically backed up within seconds to other data centers in other locations.

I use Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) for making backups of my computers' hard drives. So do millions of other Amazon customers. The 1940 census images also is stored as S3 objects, as is information from Netflix, Dropbox, and other applications. If you have the proper passwords and access, you can retrieve files from S3 storage at any time and at any location. 

So how can you use Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

It is easy to sign up for disk storage space on AWS. In fact, AWS even offers free accounts for one year with a limited amount of storage space. Start at https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup#/start. The free “starter package” can be expanded to a paid service at any time without interruption to data already residing on AWS.

Another feature that I like is that you only pay for the disk space you use with Amazon’s AWS. Many other disk storage services require you to purchase “blocks of storage space in advance of using it. For instance, if you wish to safely store 627 gigabytes of files, many services will require you to first purchase 1,000 gigabytes (one terabyte) in advance in order to have sufficient space.  Amazon’s AWS is different: if you store 627 gigabytes of files, you only pay for 627 gigabytes of file space. No more.

You can learn more about AWS’ pricing at https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/ and especially with the AWS Pricing Calculator at https://calculator.aws/#/. 

The major downside of using Amazon Web Services is that Amazon only provides the disk space. You will need to obtain additional software to install in your computer to send and retrieve files stored in AWS. In most cases, Amazon doesn’t provide that software. Luckily, many third-party products work work with AWS and prices for these products vary from free to products designed for corporate use that can be very expensive. Most of the products used by individuals have very modest pricing.

Backup products to be installed in your computer that will communicate with Amazon Web Services include Arq for Windows and Macintosh (my favorite); CloudBerry Backup for AWS for Windows, macOS and Linux; Druva CloudRanger; Duplicati for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh (free but a bit complicated); CyberDuck for Windows and Macintosh, MountainDuck for Windows and Macintosh, Transmit, Forklift2, and many others. Perform a search for any of those products on your favorite search engine to learn more.

One product serves special mention:  MountainDuck for Windows and Macintosh is a $39 US product that configures Amazon AWS as a remote disk drive in Windows Explorer or Macintosh Finder. You then can use Amazon AWS as a multi-petabyte disk drive connected to your computer. (1 petabyte is one quadrillion bytes.) That should be sufficient for most home users! Again, with Amazon AWS you only pay for the actual amount of disk space you are using. 

I use MountainDuck on my Macintosh and Windows computers and never worry about running out of disk space! You can learn more at: https://mountainduck.io/.

Summation

The various pieces of Amazon Web Services and other cloud computing providers all work together in harmony to provide “computing services on demand.” Whether computer power and storage is needed for a few hours or for a few years, cloud computing services are always available for the work. Pricing is based upon usage: the company or the individual pays only for the amount of computing power and storage space used. In many ways, this is the same operating philosophy as that of your local electric company. Indeed, cloud computing also is sometimes referred to as “utility grade” computing: available whenever you need it and billed only as you actually use it. Unlike your own data center, cloud computing customers never pay for idle servers or for purchasing hardware to pay for future growth.

If you want to back up a few files, or if you wish to serve census images to millions of genealogists, cloud computing may be the best solution.

All of this is a rather simplified explanation of cloud computing. Actually, there are more pieces and more buzzwords involved, such as DynamoDB, Route53, Elastic Beanstalk, and other features that would take much longer to detail here. I will suggest those details will only interest systems administrators. I believe I have covered the basics that will be relevant to most end users.