I’ve gotten two more links emailed to me today:

First, Lonely Planet’s rebuttal to the Thomas Kohnstamm comments, on BBC. This is slightly surreal, because they’re taking the line that there aren’t any factual errors in Thomas’s guidebooks. Elsewhere, there’s a lot of insinuation that Thomas has made up a lot of his own book, and actually did not do such a bad job on his LP books as he says. So, wait–because he admits he’s a plagiarist and a fraud, he must be lying? There’s a bad circular logic that I can’t even parse into words.

(Also make sure to listen to the audio clip–there’s a quote from Thomas where he actually sounds reasonable and normal, unlike everything else salacious. It’s true: we do look at other guidebooks, especially when we discover we’ve failed to write down the bus schedule to Oxcutzcab, say, and we’re sitting in our apartment in Queens and have no other way of finding something out. Also, it’s interesting to hear Tony Wheeler stammer a bit. And to hear a British person apologize for the vulgarity of the word “screw.”)

This leads me to the other link, a comment on Amazon.com entitled “Boycott this book please!”

This post is infuriating, because the guy is now assuming any guidebook with errors must’ve been written by someone who was too busy getting it on with waitresses to actually do the research.

But, hey, I hate to break it to you, dude: All guidebooks have errors! All guidebooks list campgrounds that have closed! And not because they were plagiarized from a 1968 guide (huh?).

It’s because the world of tourism moves fast, and guidebook publishing is so freakin’ slow. It usually takes about six months to edit a book, then another six months to get it printed. (Lonely Planet moves a smidge faster, and Rough Guides sometimes can too, even though it took a huge step backwards by moving to an even slower printer in China.)

I’m doing research in New Mexico right now for a book that will be on store shelves next April. A year from now. Even in NM, where change comes slowly (unlike, say, in Playa del Carmen), that means there will be many restaurants that will have closed, many B&Bs that will have changed hands. There’s nothing I can do–except maintain my update websites (www.moonsantafe.com, www.moonnewmexico.com, www.roughguideyucatan.com, www.cancundirections.com), and hope the readers of my books actually find them. (Moon and Rough Guides aren’t too keen to promote these sites, because they’re only for these books–no other writers do them. So it looks weird and random if only one book in the series has this “feature.”)

The solution isn’t too hard. We already have a brilliant way of getting information to people quickly–almost instantly, in fact. It’s called the Internet.

Lonely Planet is making a big push to put its information online–this will be a big step forward. Its current “Pick ‘n’ Mix” option is clever–buy the PDF-format chapters you want from a mega-book like the South America guide and print them out yourself. Now if they can just implement a process for keeping the info updated more frequently…

Rough Guides, incidentally, does have its books online, but for some reason they’re behind some un-Googleable firewall, so no one even knows this. Also, they don’t get around to putting the new editions up until months after they’ve come out in stores, so there’s often a window where the online information is much older than what you can get in a hard copy–which no one expects, and of course it’s all undated.

Moon is making a move to put books online. This is fine and smart. It would be really smart if they take my fully edited and proofed manuscript that’s produced six months from now and put that online right then–so all the information will be available six months sooner than the hard copy.

What I’m really getting at, though, is that Lonely Planet’s rebuttal is probably right: There actually aren’t any serious factual errors in Thomas’s work. LP has probably combed through and made allowances for the usual closures, bus-schedule changes and so on…and discovered no more than the usual level of mistakes.

Depressing as it is, as I work my little brain to data-crammed jelly, Thomas’s Lonely Planet work is probably no more inaccurate than anything I’ve ever written–especially after it has been on store shelves for a year or so. Righteous Amazon.com Dude is just going to have to live with that…and so am I.

Finally, getting back to the pay issue (as we inevitably do): Stephen Palmer, LP exec, says, “We’re pretty confident that we pay right at the top of the range.”

I suppose they do, at least in terms of cold, hard cash. There are other factors–do I get copyright? Royalties? How helpful are editors? Will people freak if my manuscript is late? Do I have to make sure the formatting is flawless?–that change that flat number.

But the end result, even if they’re paying “at the top of the range,” is that they’re not paying a wage that anyone can live on, at least not for more than a few years in your mid- to late 20s. So Lonely Planet has to churn its authors every few years–that’s fine, as everyone wants this job–but it also means that there are going to be plenty of newbies on the road who totally underestimated what the job entailed (as Thomas did) and the money involved, and get a little desperate. And the books are going to suffer.

(I sound like I’m slagging off LP a lot, but in fact, they are the most organized and transparent organization I work for. It’s really commendable. And they really, really make an effort to respond to authors and their gripes–they even organize workshops where authors can get together and gripe to each other and to the company. And they pay on time. This exceptional professionalism makes up a lot for the fact that authors have no guarantee of getting hired to work on the same book–or any book–again.)

There’s a big gap between old-hand guidebook authors–the ones who started doing this in the 1970s and 80s–and the young ‘uns. The old hands remember the glory days when they got huge royalty percentages–even at LP–and could actually feed their families on the money they made.

The younger generation, myself included, cannot even begin to imagine such a situation. We just accept our lot in life as freelancers–this is a highly tenuous field. Given the scope of problems in the world today, I am not calling for a living wage for guidebook authors. This is just not a top priority. But maybe readers who want better guidebooks, like Disgruntled Amazon Guy, can call for it on my behalf.