Just days after Travellerspoint revealed its simplistic, on-demand email city and country guides, social and travel publishing giant Time Out unveils its own take on the on-the-go guides.
The publisher's popular city guides are in the process of being formatted for eReaders, Blackberry, PDA and web and will available for download from its own store and other online retailers this month.
Time Out says the eBooks will be fully interactive and include the usual mapping functions and ability to add bookmarks and make notes against the content.
The digital books are being produced by Easypress Technologies.
Kicking off with guides to London, Venice, Barcelona, New York, Cape Town and Paris, content is taken from its existing guidebooks and will cost the user around £12.99 per edition.
The remaining guides in the series will be added during 2010.
Time Out isn't the only travel content publisher to have produced digitised versions of its books (Lonely Planet has pick and mix chapters for PDF and its well publicised push onto Kindle), but the pattern continues of charging for content when professional writers are involved, despite the fact that most scribes would have been paid when the hard copy versions were produced.
The counterpoint is that many smaller operations will happily give away content in various forms despite the resources required from a technology perspective and with some rudimentary editing of user generated content.
NB: See long-running Tnooz debate: Internet is ruining travel journalism