Travel guides try the web

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: About a dozen years ago, the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet series of travel books, rival bibles for the footloose and fancy free, crossed a new frontier onto the Internet. But they found their road maps to the digital future hard to read.

Guidebooks were soon overtaken online by Internet-era upstarts like TripAdvisor.com, which draws content from volunteer contributors and revenue from links to online reservations systems and advertising. Now travel publishers are trying to catch up. They are moving more of their work onto the Internet and extending their content and brands into new areas like mobile services, in-flight entertainment systems and satellite navigation devices. Travel books are getting a makeover, too.

And the recent acquisition by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British Broadcasting Corp, of a majority stake in Lonely Planet has prompted that publisher and its rivals to accelerate their search for new sources of revenue in the online world and elsewhere.

“We want to be in a position where, if the business suddenly collapses in five years, we have a plan—unlike the music industry,” said Martin Dunford, publishing director of Rough Guides, which is part of the Penguin division of the media company Pearson, based in London.

So far, the digital media revolution has been much less turbulent for guidebook publishers than for record companies, which are fighting rampant online copying. Sales of travel guides, while flat in some traditionally stalwart markets like Britain, have been growing strongly in developing countries and in the US.

Travel publishers sold 14.8 million books in the US last year, up 11% from two years ago, according to Nielsen BookScan. Still, guidebook companies may have missed an opportunity on the Internet.