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!

The first day of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008, and we’re starting off with a bang: Wikitravel Press is delighted to announce its upcoming line of Wikitravel Fresh guidebooks, built by readers from their choice of any of the tens of thousands of guides on Wikitravel.  For example, you could select “Frankfurt”, “Luxembourg” and “Helsinki”, and we’ll assemble and ship you a guide containing only those articles — cheaper, lighter and more environmentally friendly than buying three separate guides!

To make this happen, we’re teaming up with PediaPress, who have built the Collections extension for MediaWiki, which allows building your own article collections, and the PediaPress engine, for converting those collections into books.  Wikitravel Fresh books aren’t available just yet, but the technology is in place, we’re currently putting on the finishing touches and expect to have them up on Wikitravel in time for Christmas.

As for the Book Fair itself, let’s just say that it’s big — thousands of exhibitors scattered across over tens of floors in eight gigantic halls, all grouped by theme.  E-books and electronic distribution may be the buzzwords of the day (and indeed, Amazon’s Kindle presentation drew a standing-room-only crowd), but there’s still plenty of life left in the dead trees printing business as well.

Our neighbors in the Scientific Publishing section (where we’re co-exhibiting with PediaPress) are a pretty buttoned-down lot by day, but when the clock strikes five and alcohol can be served, the frenetic pace of business slows down and the bespectacled men in suits start the Buchmesse Waltz.  It goes like this: a large scientific publisher sets up a bar deep within their gigantic exhibition section and starts serving up free booze, the more moneyed ones even hiring comely staff in short skirts or bartenders in tuxedos to do the pouring.  Drawn like bees to honey, everybody nearby starts gravitating towards the bar…  and that’s when the publisher’s sales reps, lounging near the bar like lions at a watering hole, pounce on their prey.  The meek end up trapped, nodding with glass of wine in hand and glazed eyes as the agents hypnotize them with sales pitches, while the intrepid spot the opportunity and sneak off with a bottle of beer while the sales reps are distracted.  And so the cycle of publishing life continues…

This blog has been a little quiet lately, but that’s because we’ve been working quite hard on not one, but two fascinating projects and we look forward to announcing them quite soon.  Stay tuned…

But today’s news is that Wikitravel Press will be exhibiting at the Frankfurt Book Fair, in Frankfurt, Germany, in two weeks’ time.  This is the world’s largest exhibition for the publishing industry, with over 7000 exhibitors and nearly 200,000 visitors expected, and we’re excited to have this opportunity to publicize what we’re doing at Wikitravel Press.

Trade days are October 15-17th (Wed-Fri), while the fair opens to the public on October 18 and 19 (Sat-Sun).  You can find us at stand 4.2 E427 (see also hall plan).  Note that we’re not in Hall 3.1 (travel), but next door in Hall 4.2 (scientific publishing), since we’re exhibiting together with our fellow Wiki-to-print enthusiasts PediaPress.  Entry to the fair costs 12 euros for the general public, half that for students.  No book sales allowed until Sunday, but Wikitravellers just might get a free copy of our newly revised Paris guide (while supplies last).  See you there!

Here’s a new guide that’s close to my heart: my old hometown Helsinki, which also covers a few favorite of my favorite spots nearby, including Nuuksio National Park and the delightful little town of Porvoo, soon to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Finnish phrasebook also comes in handy for amusing the natives and scaring everybody else (kalastajamaisuudettomuudellansakaan, anyone?) — but don’t worry, virtually everybody in Helsinki speaks English.

The Porvoo chapter is available as a free download, while the printed book is now available in our online store. Tsekkaa jos et usko!

The choice of destinations covered by our just-released guide, Cairo and Alexandria, are no coincidence: Alexandria will be hosting the Wikimania 2008 conference on July 17-19, and Wikitravel Press is proud to the official guidebook of the conference. We’ll be printing a special edition just for the conference and presenting conference attendees with free copies (while supplies last, so show up early!). Not only is the guidebook a great demonstration of how Mediawiki technology and an enthusiastic community can combine to create wonderful things, but we’re sure that the nexus of Wikimaniacs at the conference will propel the content of the guidebook to new heights. A special thanks to Delphine Ménard and the Mediawiki Foundation for their support.

If you’re not going to the conference, or you are going and want to read up a little before you go (always a good idea), you can order the Wikitravel Guide to Cairo and Alexandria online through our bookstore. The guide also covers the Egyptian capital Cairo, with a special supplement on the Pyramids at Giza, and includes both an Egyptian Arabic phrasebook as well as a detailed reference section of traveling to and around Egypt.