Even More on RootsTech

John Reid of Anglo-Celtic Connections has hit the nail on the head with his comments about the decision by RootsTech 2012 to ban book publishers/sellers and genealogy related vendors. In his post No Books, he said,

This appears to continue the trend I sensed last year from the conference  - nothing to learn from the past, no room for the conventional. Reminds me of the Dot Com bubble days when we were told the old ways of evaluating stocks no longer applied.

Best use all tools at your disposal, and use them together.

The decision is extremely short-sighted and very exclusive of the general genealogical community. I doubt that the people making this decision have any feeling for genealogy or genealogists. I fear for the vast majority of the older, mature genealogists who are going to be lured to this Conference and find that they are out-of-date and no longer relevant. Given the demographics of the average genealogist, who do they think will attend. Last year there was a mix of the old and new, but as John Reid puts it, there seems no room for the conventional at this year's conference.