Alastair Sawday Publishing, a smaller travel publisher based in England, put all of its content, which consists mostly of hotel reviews, onto the Internet this past summer, at sawdays.co.uk. Previously, only 30 words of each review were available. Joe Green, who runs the Web site, said that the move was aimed at developing Internet advertising as a new source of revenue, to complement sales of the books and income from hotels that pay to be listed in them.
Lonely Planet plans to put all its content onto the Internet within two years, said Judy Slatyer, chief executive of the company. Not all of that content will be free, though. Over the summer, Lonely Planet began selling on its Web site, lonelyplanet.com, individual chapters from guidebooks to Latin America, pricing chapters at a few US dollars each. That way, the impulse traveler to Buenos Aires, for example, no longer needs to buy an entire book.
Slatyer said that the program would be expanded to the US this month and that other destinations would be added throughout the year. While many content owners have had difficulty getting consumers to pay for anything on the Internet, Slatyer said that sales of the chapters had exceeded expectations.
Dorling Kindersley is also trying to generate revenue directly from consumers who visit its Web site. It allows travelers to create customized guides. A group heading to Prague for a bachelor party, for instance, could assemble a list of the best bars in that city but skip information on, say, the opera.
Taking its cue from social networking services like MySpace and Facebook, Dorling Kindersley lets users share the books with other people. They can also order printed, bound copies of the customized guides for US$15.
Publishers are also making their content available in a variety of other ways. Rough Guides, for instance, has made some material available in airplane seatback entertainment systems, including those in the new Airbus A380s operated by Singapore Airlines.
Alastair Sawday Publishing recently started selling a guide to the pubs and inns of England and Wales that alerts drivers, via their satellite navigation systems, when they approach a selected watering hole or guesthouse.
Digital business still generates relatively little revenue for guidebook publishers - less than 5 percent of sales at Penguin's travel division, for example, according to executives there.
"There's been a lot of experimentation, but maybe not enough revenue coming back from digital," said Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, a trade publication based in London.
And publishers like Lonely Planet, which says it sells about 6.5 million books a year, are not giving up on the guidebook.
"The travel guide business, the good old-fashioned paper book, is still a strong and healthy business," Slatyer said. "And we think it will be for some time."
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