Lack of Travel Guides

[Sonist]

One of the reasons I am excited about ebooks, is because of the great convenience of having different guides in one thin tablet while traveling to a destination.

Often, when we travel, we purchase several guides, like Lonely Planet, The Rough Guide, etc..

I found, that of the big ones, only the Lonely Planet publishes their stuff in ebook form (and not as epub,) as well as Frommers, but publishers like the Rough Guide have only a few, less useful titles available.

The reason I normally buy several guides, is that one can't find out, which guide is best suited to one's taste, until one is actually on location (even the same publisher often has writers with different tastes covering different regions.) For instance, I generally find LP useful, but often too eager to like everything, while Frommers is often geared to a different traveller than me.

Am I missing something, and is there a mother lode of travel guides for sale somewhere, that I have not found? Or is it just that the guide publishers have not figured out this ebook thing yet?

[mattgam]

I was at a travel conference where Rick Steve's was speaking and afterwards I actually asked him why his guidebooks were not available in ebook form. He said that Amazon had brought him to their offices and demo'd the Kindle to him and that seeing the Kindle made him realize that he needed to rethink his stance on ebooks. He mentioned that he was talking to his staff about how they could design travel books for the features of an ereader and not just to a translation of the book. He didn't know when they would begin publishing the books but it was likely to happen in the future.

That gave me hope that some day I would be able to take his books on a future European vacation.

[Patricia]

There is definitely a paucity of travel guides, which is strange because many people get a device because of its advantages when travelling.

I sometimes download information from tourist websites and convert them for my Sony Reader. But this is not as good as a proper guidebook.

[wallcraft]

Frommer's travel guides have just started appearing on the Kindle and in MOBI format. There are about a dozen so far. Other guide publishers may follow if these prove popular.

I tried the London Guide on my Kindle, and it works better that I expected. The maps and illustrations are probably not much smaller than in the printed guide, but the lack of color does make the maps less readable.