A guide? But what for? What does this crazy woman intend to talk about in this article? I know I haven't said it before, but besides reading and tinkering with the reader, traveling is one of my great hobbies , and for that it's necessary (most of the time) to have a good travel guide (or several) that helps us get around and discover our destination.
Holy Week is just around the corner, and I'm sure some of you have decided to take advantage of these days to make everyone else jealous by taking a quick trip and visiting a city you've been wanting to see. At least that's what I do when time and my wallet allow for a getaway. And it was precisely on one of those trips, a couple of years ago now, that I tried carrying a "travel guide" on my small e-reader , a Sony PRS-505. It was a complete success.
For this, we undoubtedly have the option of buying a travel guide in digital format . We can go to Amazon or Casa del Libro, for example, where we can find digital guides, such as the Ecos Guides, which are quite affordable and very convenient for planning a short trip.
However, I see a problem with them that isn't exactly minor (well, it depends on your taste): most of the guides we can buy in digital format are created in PDF , so they retain their structure and appearance, but they're awkward to use with most small e-readers. While not as bad as a document designed for A4, they're still limited by each e-reader's capabilities when it comes to handling PDFs.
However, with a little skill and some time spent tinkering with Sigil or Jutoh (or any program we prefer), our reader can create a personalized guide, tailored to our trip and our reader . It's not particularly difficult and can offer many advantages when it comes to planning.
Nowadays, knowing our readers, I always carry a traditional paper guide as my "main guide" (I especially like the visual guides from El PaÃs-Aguilar); I find it more convenient for a quick glance, to locate an explanation at a look, a detail that catches my attention, but I think the potential of digital guides is enormous.
But why does this potential seem enormous to me if there isn't much room for maneuver with only 16 levels of gray? Precisely because of what I mentioned before: the customization capabilities . If we intend to carry 10 traditional paper guides, it's going to be a bit complicated, if not impossible, but we can carry everything we think we might need—10, 20, or even 40 guides—on a single memory card.
By combining the information offered by guides available in our city's public library, Wikipedia, some travel blogs, the websites of transport companies... with Sigil and a little patience, we can have our trip perfectly organized, with all the information we need at our fingertips at any time.
Well, if you like to travel a bit spontaneously, you might find so much information superfluous, but I like to leave home with all possible contingencies covered, so on my reader I can carry a list with phone numbers and addresses of interest (details of my hotel, emergencies, embassies, etc.), I can have each day organized with its "optimal" itinerary, indicating lines and stops of public transport that I need to use, restaurants organized according to the reviews I have read, additional maps, main points I want to visit with the information I need to have, everything you can think of and all "laid out" according to my needs.
Have you already switched to digital travel guides? Do you still think that nothing like paper ones? Have you chosen the middle way and combine both possibilities? Tell us a little bit.
More information – How to create an ebook with Jutoh
Source – Ecos Guides