Is This the ‘Twilight of the Travel Guidebook’?

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  03.31.10 | 11:57 AM ET

With his second edition looming, guidebook author David Page ponders the future of the genre:

As a traveler who prefers to ferret things out on his own, to skip the well-paved interpretive loop and instead wander off-trail in search of the overlooked and overgrown, I can’t say I’ll much lament the passing of the genre (assuming, that is, that the rumors of its demise have not been greatly exaggerated). Give me a half-decent map, a good 19th-century explorer’s narrative, a gallon of water and maybe a headlamp for good measure, and I’ll set off across the landscape giddy into the unknown. When I get that hankering for a decent Philly cheese steak or a sixer of empanadas de pino, I’ll risk altercation and embarrassment and ask a local—long before I try to hack my way to something useful through the thickets of TripAdvisor or Yelp.

As the author of an old-fashioned printed-and-bound guidebook, though, I worry. I wonder if it may finally be time to decamp. Or (gulp) to reinvent.

Tags: Guidebooks, Travel Writing, News and Briefs

Eva Holland is the senior editor of World Hum. She is an associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and her writing has also appeared in Reader's Digest Canada, NationalGeographic.com, the National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and WestJet's Up! Magazine, among other publications. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


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