Rick Steves Believes Printed Travel Guidebooks are not Dead

Rick Steves

Rick Steves on Printed Travel Guidebooks

Last month, three things happened that were interesting to me as a guidebook writer: After Google purchased the venerable Frommer's guidebook series, they announced that they would no longer keep them in print. http://goo.gl/WbquL I read an article about the "rapid decline of the printed guidebook." http://tinyurl.com/cgm57af And I got my biggest royalty check ever in payment for my guidebook sales.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a coffee with Arthur Frommer at the Washington DC Travel and Adventure Show. While he sold the guidebook series with his name on it a long time ago, Arthur still gives spirited talks at such shows all around the country. The first edition of his GI's Guide to Traveling in Europe, which eventually became the groundbreaking Europe on $5 a Day, was published the year I was born (1955). I have a copy of it on the bookshelf in my office as a kind of personal and thankful reminder of how Arthur’s work gave people like my parents the confidence to travel independently through Europe back when that was a new thing for middle-class Americans. You could make a case that without Arthur Frommer opening that door for my family in 1969, I’d still be teaching piano lessons.

I loved traveling with Arthur’s book for a decade (along with the backpackers’ guide, Let’s Go: Europe). Arthur’s personality — his sass, elegance, and Ivy League respect for culture and language — along with his passion for making Europe accessible (first to his fellow GIs, and ultimately to a whole generation of American travelers) inspired me. Way back in 1984, Arthur invited me to appear on his cable TV show and introduced me as “Rick Steves, the new Steve Birnbaum, Eugene Fodor, Temple Fielding of the travel guide industry.” At the time, his prediction seemed a little wacky, but — in part because most publishers have found it's cheaper to write and update guidebooks by committee rather than employ individual personalities — my generation has failed to produce a class of well-known guidebook writers. Arthur Frommer's endorsement was a huge break for me, and even though I had a hard time believing it, I used the quote a lot.

In an age of consolidation, when only big is viable, guidebook publishers are big and few in number. The major guidebook series in the USA are Fodor’s, Frommer's, Lonely Planet, Dorling Kindersley, and Rick Steves. And for many of these, the future looks shaky. Lonely Planet was owned by BBC in London for less than six years before they unloaded to a tobacco tycoon it for less than half what they originally paid. Its fate is unknown. Frommer's was purchased in August of 2012 by Google, who recently announced that they will let almost all of their 350 titles go out of print — leaving the company with piles of data to shuffle into its searchable banks, but no bookshelf presence. Dorling Kindersley (or "DK," publishers of the glossy, illustrated Eyewitness and Top 10 series) is owned by Penguin, and Fodor’s is owned by Random House — and now that those two publishing giants have agreed to a merger, DK and Fodor’s are likely to merge with them, creating more uncertainty.

And the Rick Steves line? We’re as strong and determined as ever. This week, I’m setting out with a band of 25 fellow researchers with the goal to visit in person virtually every sight, hotel, restaurant, launderette, train station, boat dock, and other place mentioned in our guidebooks, as we make them up-to-date for next year.

I think guidebook publishers are challenged in the same way news corporations are. It’s expensive for news services to pay for individual correspondents to bring home the news when it’s just out there on the Internet for all to scarf up — and viewers don’t necessarily respond to more costly, higher-quality journalism. And, in the case of TV news, the limited funds are much better spent on a good-looking anchorperson to read the news rather than quality people to gather it. That's why top-notch investigative journalism is at a critical low point these days.

Considering the modest profit margin for publishing a guidebook, publishers have a similar problem in hiring trained researchers to actually research their books in person. And new crowdsourcing alternatives to guidebooks (like TripAdvisor, CruiseCritic, Booking.com, Yelp, Urbanspoon, and so on) give travelers the impression that they have all the reviews they’ll ever need from other consumers. With the increasing popularity of these options, a tough business equation has become even tougher.

All of these review-based websites are certainly useful and informative, and I use them myself when traveling somewhere new. But I believe that — just as you wouldn't want to get all of your news from amateur bloggers — casual online reviewers take a hit-or-miss approach that isn't always an improvement on an experienced guidebook researcher with a trained eye. Most users reviewing hotels on TripAdvisor have experienced a few dozen hotels in their lives; a professional travel writer has inspected and evaluated hundreds, or even thousands. And, while these sites are particularly helpful for sleeping and eating, they do virtually nothing to explain what you're seeing when you get there. Guidebooks' sightseeing advice, self-guided museum tours, and neighborhood walks help you engage with and understand the place you've traveled so far to see, with a depth that crowdsourced websites don't even attempt. For all of these reasons, I find crowdsourced sites a handy tool to enhance, but not replace, the information I learn from a good guidebook.

Complicating matters is the advent of digital, non-print formats, which challenge traditional book-business thinking. But, while ebooks seem exciting, print sales still dominate (for now, at least); only about 15 percent of total guidebook sales are electronic.

Are guidebooks dead? Not yet, that’s for sure. I’m flying to Egypt and the Holy Land as I write this, my bag heavy with Lonely Planet, DK, and Bradt guides to Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. The question can be interpreted in two ways: Will people still be traveling with good old-fashioned print guidebooks in tow? And is the entire concept of a guidebook (whether in print or electronic) still viable? My take: For another decade, travelers will be toting print editions of guidebooks. Slowly, print will be replaced by digital. There will be a battle between various electronic information services, including guidebooks. Many users will opt for GPS-driven, crowd-researched apps. But plenty of others will still use guidebooks in their futuristic digital format — probably souped up with streaming video and GPS features. And, God willing, I’ll still be out there making sure mine are accurate and up-to-date.

Travel Writers Angst Blog from Carl Parkes

Google Pulls the Plug on Printed Frommer's Travel Guidebooks

An amazing Collection of Frommer Guides

I was once interviewed by Arthur Frommer on the Sausalito side of the Golden Gate Bridge, just after the launch of my 1st travel guidebook for Moon Publications, Southeast Asia Handbook. He quickly went over my sample copy, then boom, straight into the interview. He had all the background on Moon Publications and Bill Dalton, and asked me who funded the book. Well, I told him, I did. No advances, which worked in my favor since I got a fine 20% of net royalties. First royalty check was over $12,000, pretty amazing for any travel writer in any point in time. The interview was later shown on the Frommer show on The Travel Channel.

Skift writer Jason Clampet talks about the sudden end of Frommer's printed travel guidebooks.

Skift on Frommer's

CNN Travel on Why Google is Pulling the Plug on Frommer's

Europe on $5 a Day by Arthur Frommer

CNN on Why Google is Pulling the Plug on Frommer's Printed Guidebooks

Travel reviews are valuable online. In print? Not so much. That's why Google is killing the paper edition of Frommer's.

By Verne Kopytoff

FORTUNE -- Spotting a tourist used to be easy. Just look for someone toting around a travel guide. Today, vacationers are organizing their trips entirely online. All they need to carry with them is a smartphone to occasionally look up tourist attractions and navigate around town.

Travel guide publishers are in upheaval amid this new reality. Sales of guidebooks are down sharply as people instead turn to sites like TripAdvisor for hotel and restaurant reviews. The industry's decline was hammered home recently with two big developments.

The latest came Thursday with word that Google (GOOG) planned to kill the print edition of Frommer's, the travel guide giant it acquired last year. Google declined to comment, although Skift, a travel news site, reported that Google's editors had already broken the news to authors of some upcoming titles. Frommer's has long been a Bible for globetrotters, and its extinction in print, at least, would be a big loss for the travel guide industry. Google could continue to publish digital books under the Frommer's name and keep Frommer's website alive, however.

The second development, the BBC's sale of Lonely Planet, happened earlier this month. The British broadcaster disclosed plans to sell the guide-book publisher for $78 million, far less than the nearly $200 million it had originally paid. The buyer, NC2 Media, a Nashville-based media company controlled by reclusive billionaire Brad Kelley, promises to continue publishing travel guides.

But the huge loss the BBC took on the sale highlights the difficulty travel guide businesses face in the digital age. "If you go back 15 or 20 years, a guidebook was the only source of information for a traveler to go on," said Stephen Palmer, managing director for Lonely Planet. "Now people are using six to eight different sources of information to plan that trip. We believe the guidebook still has a role in that mix."

The decline in guidebook sales started with the recession, which decimated leisure travel. The influx of mobile devices compounded the problem. Bookstores like Borders, a big source of travel guide sales, shut down en masse. Free online travel information became more readily available, further eliminating the need to pay $30 for a guidebook.

Major travel booking engines like Expedia (EXPE), Orbitz (OWW) and TripAdvisor (TRIP) all make hotel reviews from users available to people deciding where to stay, for example. AirBnB and VRBO.com, which focus on private vacation rentals, have similar critiques. You'd have to go pretty far off the beaten path to find a hotel, restaurant, or bar that hasn't been praised or panned somewhere online. The question is whether anonymous critics are as trustworthy as professional travel writers.

Travel guides must also compete against free open source guides, which are written by volunteers. Wikitravel and Wikivoyage, a branch of Wikipedia, offer free online travel tips for cities and countries around the world. Their prose tends to be utilitarian compared with some of the professionally written guides. But they generally give a decent overview, with the usual details about hotels, tourist sites, and how to get around.

Google's brief history with travel guides started when it acquired Frommer's along with the Unofficial Guide series from John Wiley & Sons for $22 million. It wasn't Google first foray into print, however. A year earlier, it had bought Zagat Survey, best known for its restaurant ratings. Google planned to incorporate both Frommer's and Zagat reviews into its online products. The rise of Yelp (YELP) and TripAdvisor had showed that reviews could be valuable.

What Google would do with Frommer's print business was always a question, however. The match between the online Goliath and an older school publisher seemed odd. A number of Frommer's titles scheduled for release in February and earlier this month are now overdue. The most recent titles published focusing on Napa and Sonoma in California's Wine Country along with Banff and the Canadian Rockies, may be the last to be printed with Frommer's name.

Palmer, from Lonely Planet, said that the demise of Frommer's print guides would be an opportunity for his business to gain market share. But he's still waiting to see how the situation plays out. Lonely Planet sells around 5 million guidebooks annually, Palmer said. But sales are lower than they were before the recession.

U.S. guidebook sales are down 10% to 20% since 2008, he said. Recently, sales have stabilized, providing a glimmer of hope. To reach a bigger audience, Lonely Planet has started a new series of books, Discover, that are for more mainstream travelers who must make due with shorter vacations. "I don't think anyone is pretending that sales of travel guides aren't down," Palmer said. "But they aren't off a cliff. What we're seeing now is a level of stability."

Like many travel guide publishers, Lonely Planet is investing in its online business. And like many media companies, news included, the transition is difficult. Lonely Planet, of course, uses its website to sell print guidebooks along with pushing digital copies. It also makes money from online advertising and for connecting visitors with hotel reservations and insurance, among other things.

In five years, Palmer said that even more people will use tablets and smartphones to plan their vacations. But some travelers will still prefer analog over digital, contrary to predictions about travel guides heading for a quick extinction. "I think there will be a place for books," Palmer said.

The Sudden Decline of Printed Travel Guidebooks, EBooks and Travel Apps

Let's All Be Travel Writers

The amazing decline in printed travel guidebooks. Also the decline in travel apps. It's a race to the bottom with some excellent if depressing charts and graphs.

Tnooz on the Decline of Travel Guidebooks, e books and Travel Apps

NB: This is a personal viewpoint by Jani Patokallio, a former publishing platform architect at Lonely Planet.

CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, put it simply when he famously proclaimed last year: “We expect DVD subscribers to decline every quarter… forever.” It does beg the wider question: does your business model relies on selling any type of paid content? If the answer is yes – welcome to Mr Hastings’s world.

Books

Many publishers continue to operate under the assumption that printed book sales are declining gradually or perhaps even plateauing. Unfortunately the data tells a different story: the decline appears to be accelerating. Here’s Nielsen Bookscan for the travel market.

That’s from the “Guidebook Category Report, Rolling, Period 13″ for 2006 to 2012. The trendline is a simple polynomial (n=2) best fit, and if it’s accurate, the market will halve by 2015. And while that sounds drastic, it’s by no means unprecedented, as the sales of CDs did pretty much the same thing between 2006 and 2009.

Of course, the market’s not quite homogenous: Lonely Planet’s been beating the trend, mostly by continuing to invest in print and absorbing customers from the rapidly-disappearing Frommers. But that just makes LP an even-bigger fish in an ever-shrinking pond. So can the white knights of digital paid content, e-books and mobile apps, save the publishing industry?

[See Link for Graph]

[See the Link for Information on EBooks and Travel Apps]

Lonely Planet and the Rapid Decline of Printed Travel Guidebooks

For the whole enchilada, click the Skift link below.

Jason Clampet on the Rapid Decline of Travel Guidebooks

Camels and Chocolate Advice: Never, Never, Never Write for Free

Monkey Travel Writer

Never Write for Free via Camels and Chocolate

Camels and Chocolate reports on her conflict with The Atlantic.

A few months back, a well-known band came to me via their publicist wanting me to promote an event they’re sponsoring. It was a cool concept, in a fun place, and it would allow me to check another item off my Life List. The kicker? They weren’t going to pay me for my time or my effort.

The sad thing is that I briefly toyed with the idea, and I might have green lit it had it not been for SVV. “You’re a professional. You’ve been working as a journalist for a decade. Your time, your knowledge, your experience—this is all incredibly valuable to a company. You’re not doing anything for free.” I tried to negotiate with them—something that as both a female and a Southerner I’ve always grappled with—but they weren’t budging. Not understanding what social media is about, or even the power of the press, they thought covering my expenses to attend the event—an event that, mind you, I would be working—was payment enough. And so after much debate, I turned down the opportunity last week with some regrets.

But you know what? After a few days to ponder this precarious situation, I’m glad I said no.

When did it become acceptable not to pay for a service? I logged my years of interning, I more than paid my dues, I’ve slowly worked my way up the ladder in this tumultuous media climate, something that was not easy, nor fun at times. To backtrack so much at this point in my career would be a completely wrong move. I don’t write for magazines whose rates don’t make penning a piece worth my time; since when do I spend days on a project making money for other people through promotion, sponsorships, advertising dollars and Lord knows how many other benefits that come cascading down the shoulders (and pockets) of the corporations that drive these things? The short answer: not now, not ever.

And this is where the Internet is at fault and possibly the economy, too. There are so many people out there perfectly willing to give away their talent for no charge—or, nearly as bad, $10 to $20 a post—that a company knows if you say no, there are 10 other writers who will say yes. But that doesn’t make it even remotely OK. That doesn’t mean you should buy into it. Because until enough of us band together and say this isn’t right, companies will continue to think they can exploit our talents.

I graduated from journalism school. Before that, I interned at magazines, newspapers, a TV station. I was a columnist for a publication at the age of 20. I’d worked on my first guidebook for one of the biggest travel brands in the world by 23. I was hired as a researcher for Harper’s while still an undergrad. I started at Newsweek the day after I graduated college. You’ll sometimes see my name in books. I’ve written for more than 50 national magazines and newspapers. I can’t remember the last time an all-access concert pass paid the rent. And what makes any company think that I will work for free, that I don’t deserve to get paid for the exercise?

You wouldn’t ask a surgeon to operate on your heart free of charge (or for front row seats at opera). You wouldn’t expect a plumber to come out and fix your pipes for no fee (or in exchange for a sandwich). Heck, you don’t even allow a server at a restaurant to deliver your food without leaving a tip on top of an already-hefty dinner bill. Why are writers and other creatives any different?

Women, in general, tend to get the short end of the stick, too. It’s a proven fact. In my experience, we’re also not very keen on bargaining, on asking for what we deserve. SVV has gotten four raises in less than four years at his current company; every one of them was because he went to his boss and said (in not so many words), hey, you know what? I’m awesome and I deserve to be paid for my awesomeness. You should give me X amount of dollars more for my skill and expertise. And you can guess what happened next: His boss did just that. Every last time.

I, on the other hand, have worked for some of the same editors for years and have never summoned the nerve to ask for an increased rate. In some ways, I’m just happy to still be able to say I’m a magazine writer. Many of my colleagues aren’t so fortunate anymore. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be so bold in the future, that I shouldn’t make it a goal to work on the power of bargaining. Saying no to the band, something that was far from easy, was a baby step in that direction.

A fellow journalist friend, a male, who was a bureau chief at Newsweek for a decade, told me how a political magazine recently came to him with the offer to write an in-depth, 5,000-word piece for their publication. If you’re not in the journalism industry, you should know: Such an offer is a writer’s gold. We’re never given the space to write the long-form narratives or op-eds we often dream about.

He did the smart thing and responded saying he’d love such a gig, but how much did it pay? “$500,” the editor wrote back, though the friend now thinks, looking back, that the rate might have even been lower than that. $500 for 5,000 words. Ten paltry cents per well-thought-out word. (To put it in perspective, most national magazines continue to pay $2 a word as a starting rate, with more money given to their more established writers, meaning if this was a legit publication, he should have been paid $10,000 for such a story.) Politely, he declined the assignment—he is after all, a well-known journalist, and to write such a story would take weeks of his time, weeks that could be spent elsewhere on much better paying gigs—at which point the editor shot back a very snarky retort saying that my friend should be honored to write such a piece for his magazine. Really? Is that truly what editors think these days? That well-trained, sought-after writers should be thankful for the chance to earn them money? Hardly.

My point here is to all you bloggers, to all you writers, to all you photographers, to all you creative types out there who feel like you’re not valued, here’s an epiphany: You’ll never be valued until you start to value yourself.

So I beg you: When you’re approached with such an opportunity, weigh the pros and cons. Is it a good career move? Are you getting anything meaningful out of it? What are you actually receiving for your time? Or is the company just trying to use you as one of these “cloud-sourced” money machines? Whether you’re a beginning blogger with 100 readers or a veteran with 100,000, you’re valuable. And don’t forget it either. Because until you start to see your own self worth, how can you expect others to recognize it, too?

My apologies to Camels and Chocolate for originally crediting this fine article to Nate Thayer. I'm not sure where I got the confusion, but I get the message. Oh, I also posted an article from Nate that seems somewhat similar to your post, so I think that's what happened. If you want me to remove this post, just let me know. I'm sure you've got my email, so no need to work this out over Twitter. And yes, I'm a real travel guidebook writer. Two Lowell Thomas Awards from SATW, blah, blah, blah

Unpaid Internships are a Scam

Travel is actually NOT a Waste of Time

Unpaid Internships are a Scam via Slate

Wednesday's conversation about writing for free on the Internet naturally segued into the hot topic of unpaid internships. One aspect of this that's often important in D.C. is unpaid internships at mission-driven nonprofits. If you're running a mission-driven nonprofit, then obviously you have to ask yourself what your mission is. If you think your mission includes promoting upward economic mobility and an economically and ethnically diverse talent pipeline, then obviously part of your expenditure profile should be making sure that people who can't afford to spend their summers mooching off their parents can get a shot at the valuable experience your internship program offers.

This—like the question of whether your internship program actually is a valuable experience—is really a question of whether you want to live up to your mission. When it comes to greedy for-profit firms, obviously the goal is to get useful work out of people for as little money as possible, and thus you have a different issue. And the relevant analytical issue is to ask what do unpaid internships crowd out? To a lot of people, it seems to go without saying that they crowd out paid labor, but that's not clear to me. In my industry, for example, there are no formal credentialing requirements, but in practice just about everyone has a bachelor's degree. What's interesting is that some people also have a master's degree.

Spending a year as an unpaid intern sounds like a financially unattractive option. But spending nine months getting a master's from Columbia Journalism School costs $53,346. So you have one firm that's cynically offering you the chance to provide a year's worth of free labor in exchange for valuable learning and connections, and you have another firm that's cynically offering you the chance to provide More than $50,000 in exchange for valuable learning and connections. It's at least not obvious to me that the zero-salary option makes less sense than the negative-salary option. Now the real-world issue here is that financing options are relevant.

If you actually have $50,000 in the bank, then I think it's a no-brainer. You set $25,000 aside as savings to make a down payment on a house someday, and you work for free for a year spending down your $25,000. If at the end of the year you get a paying gig, good for you! If you don't, then you go into some other line of work. But who has $50,000 in the bank? The government will help make sure you can get a loan if you spend it on graduate school but not if the issue is that you just need to eat. So it's not just that young people from privileged backgrounds have access to potentially more attractive career opportunities—they have access to them on a more attractive financial basis. If college were free (so people exited with no debt) and everyone got a $50,000 graduation present for finishing, my bet is that we'd see more internships and fewer graduate schools.

Guest Editorial

And here's an editorial from a former Moon travel guidebook writer:

OUTSOURCING MOON
by X-Moon, Delhi bureau

Bill Newlin has announced that he is outsourcing all guidebook writing to a company based in Bangalore, India. Further questioning reveals that this company is in fact a plantation where monkeys have been trained to climb trees and twist off coconuts. With the recent rapid decline in world coconut production, unemployed monkeys have been ingeniously retrained by the Bangalore plantation owners to modify content for Moon guidebooks.

There are estimated to be 2,000 monkeys typing away on 2,000 typewriters.

They are divided into huts by continent: North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe.

"The maps have proved problematic," said Bill, "but otherwise, the gibberish is adequate for most travel needs. It's an ideal match for Moon because we pay them peanuts." Bill also mentioned that he is pleased that the monkeys will not dispute the format of the material. They apparently do not go berserk if print-size is drastically reduced, or the work is printed on paper so thin you can see through it. They tend to go berserk, however, if the peanut supply dwindles.

Bill spoke further: "The disconnect we were having with the human writers was causing a lot of aggravation in our editorial offices. What the chimps do is take older editions and change one word on each page, which then passes for the new edition. That's all we need really. Most of our readers don't give a fig about content anyway. What they need is the security blanket of some sort of guidebook to hold. And that's what we give them."

Next on the horizon, Newlin is thinking seriously about outsourcing cover designs to elephants in northern Thailand. "I have heard that they are quite capable artists and very adept with their trunks. Of course, the cost of feeding them is far higher than the monkeys, but still well below human designer rates, even those of starving artists in garrets." Newlin is currently looking into cheaper sources of feed for the mammoth designers, in order to cut costs.

Hard Times at Lonely Planet

The worldwide economic collapse has hit almost everyone, including publishers of travel guidebooks, as shown by this recent announcement from Lonely Planet. Actually, I'm surprised that they only cut 10% of their labor force, but I do expect more retreachment as the year progresses. I've also heard that Avalon Travel Publishing and Moon Publications are in deep shit, cancelling several of their planned Europe guides, and getting lousy reviews at Amazon on some of their replacement guides to SE Asia. They saved some money with lower royalty rates, but cut off their noses.

Lonely Planet tells staff to pack their bags
Chris Zappone
February 25, 2009 - 2:53PM

Travel guide book publisher Lonely Planet has cut up to 50 positions as the demand for guidebooks shrivels in the face of global financial crisis.The cuts will affect staff in Australia, the US and Britain where most of the company's sales and offices are.

Before the cuts the company said it had 500 people on its payroll.The retrenchments are "directly related to the economic downturn because we're a global company,'' spokesman Adam Bennett said."It represents the decline of the guidebook market in tough times.'' Mr Bennett said the US and Britain, both of which are struggling with recession, represented a combined total of 60% of guide book sales.Lonely Planet, which is 75%-owned by the BBC's commercial enterprise BBC Worldwide, said it was consulting with employees, some of whom were not having their contracts renewed, while others were having their positions eliminated.

Acting chief exectuve Stephen Palmer said in a statement that the global market for travel was not expected to pick up soon."Even the most optimistic forecasts do not predict any sustained recovery until 2010 at the earliest, and even then it is likely to be slow and patchy,'' Mr Palmer said."The US, UK and Europe are all in recession, and these territories account for over 80% of our business.''Mr Palmer cited a UN World Travel Organisation forecast for total outbound travel to dip 2% this year.

But he predicted Lonely Planet's core markets would erode further with a 10% fall in the US, 5% in Britain and 2% in Australia."It has become clear that this economic situation is unprecedented, it will not just be a blip and we need to adjust our costs so we can manage through these tough times.''czappone@fairfax.com.au

South Pacific Handbook R.I.P.

One of Moon's original authors has parted ways with Avalon Travel Publishing after 28 years but will continue to post South Pacific content on his website. The list of authors cut from Moon Publications now ranges from yours truly to David Stanley, Bill Weir, and even the founder, Bill Dalton. And it's all about money, or lack of, due to declining sales, poor marketing and distribution, and the relatively high royalty rates granted to early authors such as myself and David.

South Pacific Handbook RIP

I regret to inform you that a 9th edition of Moon Handbooks South Pacific will not be published. After 28 years and eight editions, Avalon Travel Publishing and I have decided that it will not be practical to produce a new edition.

There are a number of reasons for this, beginning with the numbers. Over the past 10 years, sales of Moon Handbooks South Pacific have dropped. The 7th edition (2000) sold a third less copies than the 6th edition (1996), and the current 8th edition (2004) has thus far sold just over half as many copies as the 7th.

Why are sales going down? Competition from other guidebooks and the internet is the obvious answer. Many people believe they can find enough free information online to make a printed guidebook unnecessary. What they don’t realize is that much of what is found on websites is dubious and incomplete, or just one-sided advertising. A majority of travel websites are run by companies which want to sell you their products or individuals eager to share travelers tips with their peers. The discipline and quality control exercised by a professional book editor is usually missing.

Since 2000 my book has faced strong competition from Lonely Planet South Pacific and Micronesia. It would be inappropriate for me to criticize that book here, but suffice it to say that the coverage there is far less consistent and detailed than that in Moon Handbooks South Pacific. Lonely Planet is a monopolistic corporation which has pushed Moon titles off the bookshelves in Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe. Doubtless they’ll be pleased to learn of Moon Handbooks South Pacific’s demise because with no remaining competition other than Frommers South Pacific, they’ll be able to space new editions of South Pacific and Micronesia further apart and cut back on the cost of researching off-the-beaten-track locations.

South Pacific Handbook RIP by David Stanley