About a dozen years ago, the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet series of travel books, rival bibles for the footloose and fancy free, crossed a new frontier onto the Internet. But they found their road maps to the digital future hard to read.
Guidebooks were soon overtaken online by Internet-era upstarts like TripAdvisor.com, which draws content from volunteer contributors and revenue from links to online reservations systems and advertising.
Now travel publishers are trying to catch up. They are moving more of their work onto the Internet and extending their content and brands into new areas like mobile services, in-flight entertainment systems and satellite navigation devices. Travel books are getting a makeover, too.
And the recent acquisition by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British Broadcasting Corp, of a majority stake in Lonely Planet has prompted that publisher and its rivals to accelerate their search for new sources of revenue in the online world and elsewhere.
"We want to be in a position where, if the business suddenly collapses in five years, we have a plan - unlike the music industry," said Martin Dunford, publishing director of Rough Guides, which is part of the Penguin division of the media company Pearson, based in London.
So far, the digital media revolution has been much less turbulent for guidebook publishers than for record companies, which are fighting rampant online copying. Sales of travel guides, while flat in some traditionally stalwart markets like Britain, have been growing strongly in developing countries and in the US - despite a weak US dollar, which has made overseas trips more expensive for Americans.
Travel publishers sold 14.8 million books in the US last year, up 11 percent from two years ago, according to Nielsen BookScan. Still, guidebook companies may have missed an opportunity on the Internet.
TripAdvisor spotted the potential in tapping users' reviews of hotels, package trips and tourist attractions, and collecting a fee each time they click through to reserve a room, for instance, on a partner site. The site supplements users' reviews with links to sites run by guidebook publishers like Frommer's. TripAdvisor, which is owned by Expedia, does not break out financial figures separately from its parent.
TripAdvisor has clearly been a big success in reaching an Internet audience. About 3.6 percent of users of travel Web sites visit TripAdvisor in an average month, according to Nielsen Online, placing it third behind Expedia and another booking service, Orbitz. Among guidebook sites, Lonely Planet ranks first, Nielsen says.
While many travel publishers have had Web sites for a long time, some of them, along with booksellers, initially worried about cannibalizing sales of guidebooks. The easy availability of travel information online may indeed have cut into sales of guides to mainstream destinations, publishers say; Londoners traveling to Paris for the weekend are less likely than they used to be to buy an entire Lonely Planet guide to France.
But new book formats are aiming at niche interests and travelers taking short breaks on low-cost flights. Meanwhile, more guidebook content is being uploaded to the Internet, where it is often available free.
Everything that appears, for example, in the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Top 10 guides, which feature only the highlights of a destination, is already available online at traveldk.com, said Douglas Amrine, publisher of Dorling Kindersley travel books, another division of Penguin.
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