In recent times there have been a series of Internet services, which allow you to create a travel guide for any city with a basic level of customization, and direct economic costs or free. The most popular are Stay.com and Offbeat, but probably will appear more in the months to come. In general, these sites allow us to create a city guide, select chapters or sites to include, and then generate the PDF to download to your computer. In some cases we may also request the printed version that already has a cost in the case
of Offbeat, for example, is about $ 25.
But I personally do not think there’s much space to sell “virtual studio guide” in PDF on the Internet. Rather, it opens at least two specific ways. On the one hand, give guidance, but monetized by side. For example, certain items such as hotels, travel agencies and restaurants have paid categories that allow prominently. Of course, this brings the risk of excessive commercialization detrimental to the quality of information. But on the other, and guides are paid that for a while preferably include sites that have paid to appear, in many cases without telling readers, a practice usually does not include notice of this situation buyers guide, unfortunately .
And there is a second way, and that is the production of virtual guides for portable devices like cell phones iPad or from model applications. The premise of Apple’s business, which has been imitated by many companies to have an “app store” which is very simple to find travel guides is an interesting space for rethinking the future of travel guides. And the model has shown that many users are willing to pay for applications, so chances are certain to cost the proposal.
Gradually, we move the model to the paper-digital world and that is a bit what you see in the guides in PDF-to move to other proposals that involve adding new features. From regularly updated content, and the incorporation of letters, comments from readers, maps, audio and video. As has happened with many other sites on the Internet, virtual tour guides should begin to incorporate the knowledge of their “readers passengers” when it comes to improving the content. Of course, this involves going beyond the “word expert” who writes the best content, but rather implies the need to create the best community of readers and encourage their participation. A topic on which not everyone is prepared.
And the versions of travel guides for tablets that are emerging as the iPad are only one manifestation of the process that is taking the travel guides ever farther from their original model on paper.