Wikitravel Press Blog

Hot on the heels of Marc Heiden’s Hiroshima, the other half of the dynamic duo behind Chicago, Peter “Peterfitzgerald” B Fitzgerald has completed Wikitravel Washington, D.C. (ISBN 1449569412).  As the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C. has an extraordinary collection of free museums, and the lion’s share of the nation’s  most iconic monuments. But beyond treasures like the Lincoln Memorial and the Smithsonian, the city is booming with shopping, dining, and nightlife befitting a world-class metropolis.  As always with Wikitravel guides, this book takes you well off the beaten path to cover every corner of the city and ranges beyond city lines into Northern Virginia and Maryland as well.

The guide retails for $14.99 and is in stock on Amazon.com:

Wikitravel Washington, D.C.: The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable guide to Washington, D.C.

The book is eligible for Free Super Saver Shipping and is generally printed and shipped out within 24 hours of your order.

Stay tuned for more news from Wikitravel Press!

Here at Wikitravel Press, we pride ourselves on updating our guides monthly, but every now and then our revisions go beyond just an update — and that’s the case for two of our titles this month.

Wikitravel Helsinki, our guide to Helsinki’s capital and the surrounding area, has now expanded to take in Finland’s second city Tampere, just an hour and a half away train.  Home to the world’s only Lenin Museum (complete with capitalist gift shop), a Moomin Valley filled with cuddly cartoon characters and the wild nightlife you’d expect from a university town, Tampere is now also Ryanair’s Finland hub and an increasingly popular gateway to the country.  There’s also a new walking itinerary called A seaside stroll in Helsinki, taking in some of Helsinki’s most popular sights and others that usually fly far below the tourist radar.

Wikitravel Singapore, dedicated to the hyperkinetic tropical city-state, has considerably expanded its coverage of Singapore’s outlying areas, with the beaches and Peranakan shophouses of the East Coast as well as historical World War II sites and the latest in dining and nightlife around the North and West of the island.  The recently opened Southern Ridges Walk, a 9-km stroll through normally unseen sides of southern Singapore and across the amazing Henderson Waves, has also been added to the guide.

The updated November editions of both books are out now and available on Amazon.com, and as always, they’re eligible for Free Super Shipping in the United States.  Get yours today!

Here’s a guidebook I’ve been looking forward to for some time: Wikitravel Hiroshima and Western Japan (ISBN 1449541518), edited by Marc “Gorilla Jones” Heiden, one of the two gurus behind our best-selling Chicago guide. This book represents our first foray into a brand new type of market, since to the best of our knowledge, this is the only full-length English-language guidebook ever written devoted to Hiroshima.  A household name due to the world’s first atomic bombing, today’s Hiroshima is a modern, cosmopolitan city with unforgettable museums, lively festivals, and lots of great food and nightlife.  The guide also covers the less-visited side of western Japan, from the sand dunes of Tottori and the deadly culinary delights of Shimonoseki to a climb up the Stone Hammer in Shikoku and a dip in the Bath of the Gods at Dogo Onsen. And with a bit more time, the enigmatic Iya Valley and the epic 88 Temple Pilgrimage beckon…

The guide retails for $14.99 and is in stock on Amazon.com:

Wikitravel Hiroshima and Western Japan: The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable guide to Hiroshima and western Japan

Like all Wikitravel guides, it’s eligible for Free Super Saver Shipping and is generally printed and shipped out within 24 hours of your order.

Stay tuned for more new releases from Wikitravel Press!

After our successful launch on Amazon, the second wave of Wikitravel Press books is now starting to emerge from the incubator, and today I’m delighted to announce the first new title in the series: Wikitravel San Francisco (ISBN 1442169966), edited by John “PerryPlanet” Perry.  Packing a 312-page punch, Wikitravel San Francisco goes beyond tourist-packed Fisherman’s Wharf to give you a local’s guide to one of America’s most fascinating cities, from the hippie vibe of Haight-Ashbury to the digerati dance clubs of SoMa and the dive bars of the Tenderloin, with detailed maps and complete coverage of 14 city districts.  The guide retails for $15.99 and is in stock on Amazon.com:

Wikitravel San Francisco: The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable guide to San Francisco

Like all Wikitravel guides, it’s eligible for Free Super Saver Shipping and is generally printed and shipped out within 24 hours of your order.

In other news, you can now keep up to date with Wikitravel Press at identi.ca and Twitter.  The Wikitravel group at Facebook is also active.  Be sure to join one, since there is plenty of news coming up in the next few months!

After a lot of quiet work in the background, I’m delighted to announce that Wikitravel Press books are now available on the web’s favorite bookstore, Amazon.com.  This also means big savings for our readers, as Wikitravel books are eligible for free super saver shipping (in the United States) if you buy over US$25 worth of any eligible products on Amazon.  The first title to go online is Wikitravel Chicago (ISBN 1440427755), and the rest of the catalogue is expected to be up by the end of November.  Read all about it in our press release, or click below to try it out!

Wikitravel Chicago: The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable guide to Chicago

UPDATE: Amazon is now correctly listing the books as In Stock, instead of the previous erroneous “1-2 weeks”.  This means your book will usually be printed and shipped within 24 hours of your order!

One of the greatest things about our Paris guide have always been the amazingly detailed maps, lovingly crafted by Mark Jaroski from OpenStreetMap and Wikitravel data, but the regular guidebook format doesn’t really do them justice. That’s why we’ve decided to release a special Paris city map book, containing enlarged versions of the maps (A5 sized, or half a sheet of paper), but in glorious full color with a spiral binding, so you can lay it open and keep it open to a given map page as you wander around town. And I have to stress that detailed bit, just take a look at (say) the 13th arrondissement — click to enlarge!

In fact, it’s so big and detailed, we’ve split it across two full pages. All the listings in the main Paris guide are marked on the map complete with listing index, making the city map your perfect travel buddy. Pick one up now!

With only one Buchmesse under my belt, I’m not sure I’m entirely qualified to dispense advice… but here are 10 things I wish I had known or I’m very glad I did for the Fair.

1. Buddy up. Stands start from 1000 euros (2×2m), and you’ll want to have 3 people a day on site so you can comfortably man it and scout around at the same time. Both are much easier to deal with when you can share with another company, and an official co-exhibitor listing (incl. catalog entries) is “only” 250 euros extra.

2. Sign up early. If you’re not registered by July, a good 4 months before the Fair, you won’t be listed in any of the printed catalogs, making it that much harder for people to find you.

3. Start networking before the Fair. The main value of the online catalog is not the list of companies, but its lists of contacts at those companies. Figure out the companies you want to target and the people at them who will be attending, then fire off emails to arrange appointments. Trying to find anybody while the Fair is already in progress can be tough.

4. Study the event calendar in advance, and plan accordingly. There are hundreds of events, and almost all of them will be irrelevant, but those few that aren’t can be invaluable.

5. Bring A4 handouts that explain what you’re all about, written so that your grandmother can understand it.  When decorating, beware that posters taped to the wall look cheap, and logos silkscreened onto fabric are tough to set up so they look nice. Logos silkscreened onto particleboard sized to fit, on the other hand, are easy to set up and look great — just bring solid hooks to keep them up.

6. Bring a vast stack of business cards, and leave an extra stack at the stand when you’re not there yourself, so people can get in touch with you later.

7. Bring water and snacks. Once on site, a cup of hot water with a teabag from food service monopolist Accente costs 2.50 euros, and you’ll probably have to queue for 15 minutes.

8. Bring a mobile data card (UMTS) for your laptop, preferably with an unlimited or at least very, very cheap quota. Otherwise you’ll have to pay 50 euros a day for wifi!

9. Learn the shortcuts.  Exhibitors have access to special entry gates, which can shortcut the often very long entry queues, esp. on the weekend.  And instead of relying on the perpetually jammed Via Mobile and its slow escalators, it can be much faster to use the stairs or nip between buildings by going outside.

10. Dress up. Slogan T-shirts and black turtlenecks may be hip at Web/new media conferences, but at Frankfurt, dark suits and sober ties are still the order of the day. You don’t need to go whole hog, but at a minimum, a collared shirt, a jacket and presentable (but comfortable!) shoes are needed if you want to get respect, stand out from the tourists, and sneak into that medical journal publisher’s cocktail party.

One of the pleasures of attending trade fairs and conventions is meeting up with other members of the globally distributed Wikitravel tribe.  On Thursday, User:Sapphire managed to drop in during a fortuitously timed stopover at Frankfurt Airport, and today, User:Mark did a five-hour-one-way odyssey from Lausanne just to attend the Fair.  Pictures were taken, books signed, pictures taken, invaluable travel advice dispensed, obscure details of map generation with XSLT and typesetting with xelatex were discussed, and a few beers quaffed too.

This was also the first day of the Fair open to the public, meaning that, aside from the odd journalist, trade visitors virtually trickled to a halt. Instead, vast hordes of random people more than made up for it in quantity, if not necessarily quality — at least from a businessman’s point of view.  One major group of visitors, however, I did not expect: as Frankfurt’s top event in the comics calendar, the Fair has been adopted by the rabid role-playing manga and anime fans, vast hordes of whom showed up in costumes ranging from simple to incredibly elaborate.  Photography was permitted (with permission, always readily granted), and on a sunny day the central Plaza outdoors and, of course, the Comics area itself in Hall 3.0 provided rich hunting grounds for snaphounds.  Next time, I’m bringing along my 50mm prime portrait lens and an external flash!  Take a look at the gallery on my personal pages.

Old Buchmesse hands say that Wednesday is when the action is, but not for us — here every day at the Fair just seems to get busier!  So much so that today’s blog entry is going to be a short one.

But I had the time to nip out and meet up with the EU Latitude project, who have set out to create a database of travel information that aims to cover all of Europe in many languages, all available in a unified XML format for easy syndication to other devices.  It’s not the first time this has been tried, and indeed some larger travel publishers already offer commercial systems for licensing their own proprietary content, but the really interesting bit is that those parts of the content contributed or paid for by local tourism authorities are planned to be licensed under Creative Commons.  I have to emphasize that “planned to be”, because they’re having some problems convincing wary travel publishers of this bit, so drop them a line at Contact Us and let them know what you think!

Today was the last trade visitors’ day, and tomorrow the Fair opens up to the public.  I doubt there will be too many crowds in the Scientific Publishing section, but the already intense crowds in the hallways and at lunchtime aren’t going to get any better…

After a bit of a quiet start on Wednesday, the Fair’s travel publishers seem to have ventured out to explore en masse today, and I had the chance to have many interesting discussions with many smaller publishers in the travel industry.  Most if not all are facing the same problem: paying writers to write guidebooks is prohibitively expensive, especially in niche speciality markets (hiking guides, smaller languages, etc), so they’re stuck with slow release cycles and are increasingly losing market share to the Internet and the (mostly English) juggernauts of the travel publishing world.  What to do?

The solution is simple: take the guidebooks that you can’t afford to update and release them under the Creative Commons license, so they can be integrated into Wikitravel.  Once quality content is online, Wikitravellers will find and start to use it, and the community will then start to update the content.  This now-revised content then can be packaged back into guidebooks using Wikitravel Press technology, sold either under the Wikitravel brand, or as a white-label version for your own distribution via other channels.

Speaking of white-label distribution, this is another opportunity for all those countless companies out there reusing Wikitravel content on their websites.  Once the Wikitravel Fresh system announced yesterday is in place, we’ll be setting up a partner program so your users can use your website to order books from Wikitravel Press, with a partner commission for you plus the possibility of applying your own branding.

And an update: our Paris editor, map wizard and all-around good guy Mark Jaroski will be at the Wikitravel Press stand (Hall 4.2, E427) on Saturday afternoon.  Drop by to get an autographed copy of the guide!