ARose Books was founded in Incline Village, NV on July 1, 2002 by Marcella Parsons to fulfill a dream of living in Lake Tahoe and publishing books from a collection gathered from antique stores across the country.
2002 – 2004 were spent publishing our first nine books.
In 2004 all of our books were being carried by Barnes and Noble, including Walden and B. Dalton bookstores as well as hundreds of online bookstores worldwide.
In 2005, Google Book Search added our books to their search feature, giving the reader the opportunity to browse a book just as one would in a real bookstore.
In 2006, Marcella and Katherine Parsons paused from publishing to write a patent on interactive digital book technology prompted by a study of eBook sales and technology. On Dec. 8, 2009, the U.S. Patent office granted the patent.
In 2007 ARose Books moved East and is now headquartered in a 150 year old home in Pennsylvania. The land was originally deeded to a Revolutionary War veteran and kept in their family until some few years ago. ARose Books has a fitting home to publish books on American History.
In 2007 we converted our books to Amazon Kindle book format and added them to the list of Kindle books.
In 2008 we created www.vintage-american.com and The Alaskan by James Oliver Curwood was released in October 2008.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain, The Shepherd of the Hills by Harold Bell Wright, and Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery have been released in 2009. We also published a book entitled, To My Children’s Children, the memoirs of an Irish American and U.S. Marine veteran written to his grandchildren. This book is for private distribution to family and friends only.
Amazon “Search Inside the Book” has been added to all of our titles in 2009 to reflect our work rather than other publishers’ titles.
All titles are available as Kindle and Mobipocket books in 2009.
Espresso Book Machine
As of May 29, 2009, all of ARose Books titles are now available for purchase from one of the new Espresso Book Machines located throughout the world. These ATM machines for books will allow you to walk right up, select a book, and have it printed, bound, and delivered to you right there at the machine.
If you would like to try the new Espresso Book Machine, you can find the current locations from OnDemandBooks.
2010 saw us spending quite a bit of time building up the Vintage American site with vintage postcards and our Zazzle online store selling the reprinted vintage images on gift items.
In 2010, we published The Little Lass and the Sailor and Glad Voices – Christmas Verses from Chimes of Consecration our first Christmas book. We also improved all of eBooks on the Kindle and MobiPocket stores, the Apple iPad store, Barnes and Noble Nook store, and the Sony Reader store so that they all take advantage of the different technical aspects of each reader as well as include linked table of contents, linked list of illustrations, author biographies, and in some cases the original NY Times reviews.
In 2010, we improved the ARose Books website with a new design and layout.
In 2012 and 2013, we worked primarily on building up the store for our site Vintage American located at: www.zazzle.com/vintageamerican
2014 started out with a lot of activity – all of our eBooks went live on on Kobo bookstore which has international distribution, so along with Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and the Apple iStore we are selling eBooks all over the world everyday!
In 2015 We began moving our books from Lightning Source as the printer, to Create Space, an Amazon company. Create Space has their own store along with Amazon.com, so many of our titles have links to purchase the book from the Create Space store.
In 2016 we found that other publishers were copying our book cover designs. We set out to get US copyrights on all of our book cover designs as well as proprietary content within each book. This was achieved by 2019.
2017 – current – Continue to grow our www.zazzle.com/vintageamerican site which has sales almost every hour round the world! We haven’t produced many new books but have updated to current eBook standards, when they change every few years. In 2021, we hired an illustrator to illustrate books that ARose Books plans to do in the next five years, so that we will have custom illustrations. As when we started, our goal is simply to make beautiful books from vintage books that we love.