Travel guide site TripWolf is to work with guidebook brand Footprint to digitise its entire portfolio of destination content from around 60 books.
Following a trial for Footprint’s Peru edition, TripWolf will spend the next few weeks and months taking the original text files of the remaining guidebooks and add a string of electronic marks to make it web-friendly.
CEO Sebastian Heinzel says the Footprint content will be available alongside existing material on the Tripwolf site – but will include a Footprint stamp to indicate the source.
The wider implications are actually more interesting than a relatively simple content syndication deal between off and online publishers.
Heinzel says the Footprint site is also likely to relaunch in early-2010 and the content TripWolf has digitised – “semantically looking at the content to pick up points of interest, important information” – will be fed back to the source.
TripWolf has therefore created a new service within its business to service traditional offline content providers with what it calls modern, digital content publishing techniques.
The move is actually an critical one for all destination and travel guide websites as they look to monetise their busines into areas outside of the now traditional display advertising and modestly priced PDF downloads.
Footprint and TripWolf will also make the content available via a number of mobile applications still to be launched.
I wonder if the authors of the guidebooks will get any additional remuneration from the deal? Highly unlikely.
Are they going to charge for the apps? Surely they are.
> I wonder if the authors of the guidebooks will get any additional remuneration from the deal?
Depends on the contracts they signed (i.e. if Footprint 100% owns the content).
I’m a big fan of footprint guides, great alternatives to LP and RG. But wouldn’t they be better of putting their own content online? By outsourcing it, they will be creating duplicate content on tripwolf and damaging their own SEO efforts (& of course any attempt to monetize their own web-site.
On the flip side, it could be a good way to grow their brand exposure & sell more books.