Dear English-speaking readers, this page is an automatic translation made from a post originally written in French. My apologies for any strange sentences and funny mistakes that may have been generated during the process. If you are reading French, click on the French flag below to access the original and correct text:
Français I often cut my travel guides to the bone, to keep only the chapters that interest me... I found an alternative to the massacre: download them in PDF, on the Lonely Planet website.
Massacre with a cutter
Do you share this habit with me? Often, instead of taking a complete travel guide in my luggage, I cut up the book to keep only the chapters that interest me. Saves space and weight!
Fortunately, I found a digital alternative to this massacre: download the chapters. It's called Pick & Mix Chapters and it's happening on Lonely Planet's English site.
Pick & Mix Chapters
It works in two clicks, we only pay a few euros for the pages and we save them as a PDF file on his computer. We can then print them.
Of course, you have to be an English speaker, since it exists only in English for the moment. But for me, who is just interested in the South-West of Thailand, for my next trip to the Andaman Sea, it is ideal. As I don't want to buy another guidebook on Thailand, I jumped on this new service!
They are smart, at Lonely Planet ...
dematerialisation
I don't have any stock in them, but for my favorite destinations in Southeast Asia, I have always found the Lonely Planet editions better done, more complete and less faulty than the famous Routard. The latter, for example, no longer had a chapter on Sulawesi in its guide Indonesia when I was preparing my trip in 2007.
The problem is that Lonely Planet guides (LP) are often very big, very bulky. For Malaysia, in 2006, I had in my bag a piece of Routard just for the east coast of the peninsula, and pieces of the LP corresponding to the east of the peninsula and Borneo. For Sulawesi, in 2007, I just took the corresponding small section in the voluminous LP Indonesia. See what's left...
Afterwards, I tinker with glue, Scotch tape, and even drawing clips, to reconstitute a sort of personalized guide. Often, along the way, the pages come apart and escape, as I manipulate them and make them suffer new tortures...
I dematerialized my photos, my music, my videos, without qualms. Long live digital! But now, even if I'm very happy to have my two chapters in PDF, I feel a little twinge of sadness. Because it's not quite the same anymore.
Buying a travel guide, leafing through it, annotating it, and even cutting it up with a cutter, was for me a delicious ritual, full of promises, announcing an imminent departure. A journey before the journey, in short.
With the download of chapters to the card, I lose a little of this pleasure. And I feel, regretfully, the upcoming decline of travel guides in the form of books ...
😳
