Frankfurt Book Fair, Day 2: How Wikitravel Press can help your travel business
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!
Tags: announcement, book fair, buchmesse, frankfurt, guidebook, pediapress, travel, travel guides, wikitravel fresh