May 9 2007
Acclaim Travel Guides Are Free on the ‘Net
Avant-Guide travel books are now available in digital format at Wowio.com for free. These PDF digital versions are exactly the same as their $20 print siblings available in local bookstores.
Avant-Guide is hoping to increase their market share and increase brand awareness by giving away the books for free. Avant-Guide is still making money by including sponsorship pages: two in the front and one in the back.
Registration is easy if you have a non anonymous email address. (No google, yahoo, hotmail, etc is allowed). You provide first name, last name and zip code. You are then sent a confirmation email with an authorization code and link. The link fills in the authorization code.
You have to then pick out a password and give your DOB and gender. There are alot of survey questions that I did not answer. You are allowed to download up to five a day. Readers are not give a choice of format – only PDF.
I chose the Chicago travel guide and it was a monster – 48.9 MB and on my high speed DSL connection, it took a while to download (almost 8 minutes). The guide is very pretty but unreadable on my desktop until I had enlarged the page by 150%. The Verizon Wireless ads were unobtrusive and easily passed over.
Note: Ironically, this free book site looks better than many publisher’s websites.
Send to Kindle
May 09, 2007 @ 09:55:50
Oof! Only valid for the US. I got a “sorry, dear international friend” message.
May 09, 2007 @ 15:04:19
uh… use an address in the US? no?
Jul 14, 2009 @ 09:27:19
This sounds like it’s potentially useful, but it doesn’t seem practical to print the whole thing out on regular size paper and lug it around. I guess you could just print the pages you think you’re likely to find most useful, e.g. sections on particular neighborhoods or sites you know you want to visit. But as a marketing tool to let people sample the product, it seems like a decent idea. Thanks for the link! – Josh Roberts, SmarterTravel.com