Rough guides
Rough Guides is a publisher. He was best known for his travel guides in the Rough Guide series, meanwhile the concept has also been expanded to include introductions to other subject areas and a world music label belongs to the publisher. Founded in 1982 by several university graduates, Rough Guides has been part of Pearson PLC since 1998 , where it is part of Penguin Books .
The first book to appear as a Rough Guide was a self- published Greece travel guide by the later founder of the publishing house, Mark Ellingham . After the success of the book, he published travel guides on Spain, Portugal and Mexico for Routledge in the following years , before founding his own publishing house with Martin Dunford in 1986 . It followed a similar concept to the older Lonely Planet . While the Lonely Planet focused almost exclusively on Asia in the 1980s, the Rough Guides focused on Europe. In contrast to other travel guides of the time, Lonely Planet and Rough Guides were not primarily concerned with sights and typical tourist locations, but instead claimed to include the everyday and subculture of the locals. Together with Lonely Planet, Rough Guides established a new type of travel guide: these were aimed primarily at young people who wanted to explore the world on their own: Rough Guide was one of the pioneers who brought individual tourism and backpacker trips from a niche market to a mass phenomenon. After Mark Ellington had already expressed his criticism of mass travel, especially by plane, and its environmental pollution several times in previous years, he left Rough Guides in 2007 and joined Profile Books .
By 2007, over 300 different travel guides had been published, and from its inception to 2007, Rough Guides had sold around 30 million books. Around 100 authors are part of the publisher's permanent base. Penguin used Rough Guides as a field of experimentation when the publisher offered the content of all 100 travel guides available at the time for free on its website in 1999. In 2009, however, Penguin caused controversy: the publisher signed an exclusive contract with the bookstore chain WHSmith , which has an almost monopoly on bookstores in train stations and airports. After that, WHSmith only carries Penguin travel guides in its travel bookstores: Rough Guide is one of two brands that have been available there since summer 2009.
Remarks
- ^ The Independent: Mark Ellingham: The travel guide guru who's still roughing it ( April 6, 2010 memento in the Internet Archive ), April 28, 2007
- ↑ Amelia Hill: Travel: the new tobacco in: Guardian, May 6, 2007
- ↑ a b Jane Knight: End of the guidebook? in: The Times, October 6, 2007
- ↑ Susan Horner, John Swarbrooke: International cases in tourism management Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004 ISBN 0750655143 p.50
- ↑ Benjamin M. Compaine, Douglas Gomery Who owns the media ?: competition and concentration in the mass media industry Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000 ISBN 0805829369 p 135