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The Decline of the Guidebook

Posted on August 4, 2007

We’re traveling with three guide books for SE Asia. The Rough Guide to SE Asia (Aug 2005), Lonely Planet SE Asia on a Shoestring (March 2006) and SE Asia, the Graphic Guide (2003.)

Each has their strengths and their weaknesses, and they are all out of date. I’m convinced the guidebook is in a slow state of decline.

The more we travel the less we are relying on them. We are relying much more on websites run by expats, and to some extent on wikitravel.org (though their policy of not allowing links to local listings sites is ridiculous and makes their site a lot less useful.) Websites tend to be more up to date, and more relevant than the books.

Our favorite site for the region is travelfish.org. It’s essentially an electronic guidebook, run as a commercial venture with various contributors. As a traveler you can add your own comments on places you have visited, stayed and eaten for others to see.

Here in Hanoi there’s an expat-run local listings site - newhanoian.com - we wish we’d found it before we arrived since it has great hotel reviews and a comprehensive guide to the city.

The guidebooks are useful for information that’s static - like how long it takes to travel between cities (though this can change a lot too, like in Laos when they pave the roads) and for tourist sites and history. They fall down on the more recent history, which to me is more interesting than ancient ruins.

If you were traveling in the US or Europe, hopping between cities, you could pretty much get by with yelp, citysearch and wikitravel. The time will come when the book is no longer needed, and everything you need is on some kind of electronic device (ie. a cellphone.)

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