It could be the final chapter for guidebooks. Certainly it’s the end of an era, with two separate announcements that the twin pillars of travel books – Rough Guides and Lonely Planet – will lose their founders after decades at the helm.

Mark Ellingham, who published the first Rough Guide 25 years ago, said last week that he was moving on to join Profile Books, to work on tomes other than travel. Just days later, Maureen and Tony Wheeler, who put together the first Lonely Planet on their kitchen table in 1973, all but obliterated that news by announcing that they were selling a majority stake in their company to BBC Worldwide, taking very much a back seat with just 25 per cent.

The change of personnel is only part of an underlying shift in travel publishing in which more of us are turning to our computers rather than bookshops for destination information.

Mark Ellingham predicts: “We are on the cusp of major change. In the next five years, guidebooks will be almost completely digital.”

The internet is increasingly a home to a plethora of vodcasts, podcasts and travel websites compiled by amateurs and professionals. Savvy publishers such as Mr and Mrs Smith and The Hedonist’s guide series have already seen the writing on the wall and have responded by developing exclusive online content. The former adds a new collection of 10 to 40 hotels to its website every month to supplement its clutch of books, while the latter gives free online updates to book purchasers.

But, according to Ellingham, this is just the start. With next month’s UK launch of the iPhone, which makes for easy reading of digital matter, he foresees that the future of guidebooks is going digital. By cutting out paper costs and substituting PDF downloads paid for individually or by subscription, information will become much less costly.

“The book market is stagnating and beginning to decline and the digital medium becoming properly useful,” he said. “There will be a thinning out of travel guides – there are too many at the moment. A lot won’t make the transition to digital.”

It is a move that may eventually affect the whole book industry, although travel seems to be one of the sectors most ripe for change: even though the general book market grew last year, travel book sales dipped more than 2 per cent, falling 5 per cent in the first half of this year, according to the Travel Publishing Year Book.

That the future is no longer about rows of books on shelves is a view shared by Maureen and Tony Wheeler. “The business is no longer just about guidebooks. The digital side will at some point be larger than the print side,” Tony Wheeler said from his Melbourne home.

Recognising this, Lonely Planet has recently produced city guides with Nokia mobile phones and Sony Play-Station Portable. And this year, it launched Haystack for online hotel bookings (on the basis that it was easier to find a needle in a haystack than a good hotel), as well as Pick & Mix guides, whereby chapters of different books can be downloaded for multi-destination travellers.

“I wasn’t convinced on this, but it totally exceeded our expectations. I was wrong,” Wheeler said.

Understanding that a greater revolution in travel information was just around the corner, and that his and his wife’s strengths lay more in traditional publishing and travel, Wheeler said they were ready for someone else to take the company into the technological age. The BBC will be doing “a lot more with the website”, he added.

One online possibility, he said, was to publish information that had appeared in previous books but no longer justified print costs. For instance, at one stage, Lonely Planet had 60-70 pages of print information on Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), which has been condensed into ten pages in a book on Central Africa. Through the internet, the full content can be made available again.

Looking back, both the Wheelers and Ellingham recognise that theirs was a golden age of travel. “When we started, there were hardly any travel books at all,” said Ellingham. “It was exciting, pioneering and a lot of fun.”

The Wheelers hooked up with the BBC so that they could continue travelling. But Ellingham is now very aware of his carbon footprint, and is cutting back to one or two long-haul flights a year. The man who inspired millions to travel said: “We need to fly less. Many of us are guilty of binge flying because it is so easy and cheap. I don’t think it is sustainable.”
Additional reporting Renata Rubnikowicz

Lonely Planet
The hippie trail was the beginning of it all for Maureen and Tony Wheeler. After Across Asia on the Cheap, they produced SouthEast Asia on a Shoestring, which remains one of the company’s most successful books among 500 current titles. The Wheelers, who live in Australia, still spend about half of every year on the road. Tony Wheeler said that this year he has driven the Plymouth-to-Banjul challenge and been to Mongolia and Africa, where he climbed Kilimanjaro.

80 million – Number of books sold by Lonely Planet since 1973

Rough Guides
When Mark Ellingham went to Greece after graduating in 1981, he was trying to avoid a proper job. Instead, he founded a guidebook phenomenon that now prints 300 travel titles. From writing The Rough Guide to Greece – an “act of creative desperation” – he went on to pen editions on Spain, Morocco and Portugal.

Rough Guides also branched out to cover areas such as world music, which largely followed Ellingham’s personal interests.

30 million – Number of books sold by Rough Guides since 1982

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