The future for travel guides

For a long time now publishers have been bemoaning the decreasing sales of their guidebooks as travellers turn increasingly to user generated content on-line. Lonely Planet (which was recently bought by the BBC) has introduced a new Pick and Mix concept that allows you to download just the chapters of a particular guidebook that you are interested in. A chapter costs £2.50 Wonder if it will catch on? For me the great thing about a guidebook is it's tangible... something to leaf through ona train, in the loo, wherever. But it's a creative idea... and I doubt it will do much damage to sales of the physical guidebooks either - unless Amazon starts selling the PDFs too... that would create havoc! They're pushing the concept too - it's promoted with a banner on their home page.

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