LP has launched a new website, with a great expansion of content, both written and visual. If you check out the Taiwan pages for example, you’ll find the intros to every destination as they are written in the current guide. Many listings include transport info, maps, and for larger destinations some points of interest. All countries offer the same format, which makes the site pretty cool for checking out somewhere you want to visit.
The pics are crap for Taiwan as usual. Could we please have some mountains for a country we tout for its fabulous hiking.
Anyway, I should also mention the Pick & Mix section as this allows buyers to purchase individual chapters of the guide as PDF files. Cheap too. The east coast for example is only US$4.
The map is integrated with google earth but no extra functionality. I’m disappoint you can’t just zoom into a place and then it gives you a list of the local hotels, destinations, train stations etc. This is the stuff that would be really great.
People still buy travel guidebooks? Wikitravel and google are your friends.
The Lonely Planet and other guidebooks for Korea are garbage, and practically ignore any area outside of Seoul. Besides, information on hotels and restaurants change so often that I’m not going to take the word of some guy who may or may not have even visited the place.
[quote=“hannes”]Are you using Hanyu Pinyin for the transliteration?
Then it should be “Ruisui” and “Ruili”, right?
“Alishan has a peerless draw in the wonderful old narrow-gauge railway (one of only three in the world) that still runs the route up from Jiayi.”
I would add a “high-mountain” or “alpine” in this sentence, otherwise you are saying there are only three narrow-gauge railways in the world.
Sorry, couldn’t resist looking for some flaws on the site. [/quote]
Don’t use hanyu pinyin for place names. We use the official names as they were at the time of writing (with alternates when they are in common usage). Hanyu pinyin is used in the book when hanyu pinyin usage exists on the ground.
Yeah, should have apline in there. The chapter opening does in any case.
Why would anyone need to buy the guidebook if they gave away this?[/quote]
They could make millions from google hits alone…[/quote]
If that were true they would be doing it, and so would every other guide book company. Fact is no one really knows how to make money off the Internet from publishing and lots of different models and experiments have failed. Still, more are in the works. Likely in a couple years most people will simply download books with print on demand available if you need or want a hard copy.
I have pix but I will have to wait till tomorrow nite to put them up -got to go to sleep now. Doesn’t have the thousand-foot sheer walls, but there are marble walls and there a NO people down (up) there. Will post some stuff tomorrow (Thursday) evening.
