Acclaim Travel Guides Are Free on the ‘Net
09. May, 2007 | by Jane |
3 Comments
Print This Post
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.
Author of This Post
Open Threads at Dear Author. Want to know what new releases are out this month and what readers are excited about reading? Check out the threads below. 
Oof! Only valid for the US. I got a “sorry, dear international friend” message.
uh… use an address in the US? no?
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