Just days after Travellerspoint revealed its simplistic, on-demand email city and country guides, social and travel publishing giant Time Out unveils its own take on the on-the-go guides.
The publisher’s popular city guides are in the process of being formatted for eReaders, Blackberry, PDA and web and will available for download from its own store and other online retailers this month.
Time Out says the eBooks will be fully interactive and include the usual mapping functions and ability to add bookmarks and make notes against the content.
The digital books are being produced by Easypress Technologies.
Kicking off with guides to London, Venice, Barcelona, New York, Cape Town and Paris, content is taken from its existing guidebooks and will cost the user around £12.99 per edition.
The remaining guides in the series will be added during 2010.
Time Out isn’t the only travel content publisher to have produced digitised versions of its books (Lonely Planet has pick and mix chapters for PDF and its well publicised push onto Kindle), but the pattern continues of charging for content when professional writers are involved, despite the fact that most scribes would have been paid when the hard copy versions were produced.
The counterpoint is that many smaller operations will happily give away content in various forms despite the resources required from a technology perspective and with some rudimentary editing of user generated content.
NB: See long-running Tnooz debate: Internet is ruining travel journalism
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About Kevin May
As one of those ‘scribes’ – although I hasten to point out not for LP or Time Out – this issue of taking copy I’ve written for a print edition and using for other projects is truly vexing. But there’s nothing I can do about it… contractually everything I write can be used and reused wherever the publisher wants. I wonder though whether this is the case for all publishers?
Very interesting. ebooks (w. links etc) + mobile = huge business opportunity, turning travel books into measurable transaction machines. Not to mention that for readers/travelers it means having info updated to latest info right now, rather than the latest info from 2 years ago.
By the way, the link to “Internet is ruining travel journalism” is sending me to the wrong thing.
Hugh: link fixed. thx
Jeremy –
At Outside Magazine, there would be writers that would have special deals that governed how their stuff could be used. These deals would later came to haunt the publication when it started working with Seattle-based Starwave on its first online initiative. Once you run into a situation like that it makes you take a hard look at all of your contracts: a single person could prevent you from issuing the digital version of an entire magazine.
And, unless things have changed drastically, BPA won’t allow you to count the readership of a digital version of a publication unless it is substantially the same as the audited print version.
As a result, since the 1990s most publishers have added ancillary rights clauses that give them perpetual rights in whatever digital products happen to come along.