Customer Reviews

India (Country Travel Guide)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I used the 14th Edition of Lonely Planet India to get around in India (of course) for four weeks in October 2011. Overall, I liked how LP reorganized and reordered the info in the book. I thought the manner in which they listed sights, hotels, and restaurants, etc. was better than their previous method, having used past LP's to travel elsewhere. I also found the information in the book to be accurate and agreed with most of their descriptions of hotels and places to eat.

The one point that I did not like in this edition was that LP seems to have lessened the geographic size of the maps in the book, and also eliminated some helpful maps that were in the 13th edition (e.g. various maps of the Darjeeling area). So instead of a map showing a larger portion of a city or several different areas of a city, you now get a map showing only the city center/one area but with more detail. In prior versions of the India guide, LP's maps covered larger and more diverse areas. Some people may like the extra detail of the smaller maps, but I personally liked the broader map coverage of past editions.

I am planning a 6 week trip to India and because I am a devoted Lonely Planet user, I purchased the Kindle version of Lonely Planet India. (I like to travel with Kindle instead of lots of heavy books.) After going in circles trying to do my pre-trip research on the Kindle version, I gave up and am now ordering the hard copy to "shlep" with me. I don't know if the versions are actually different or if it is the way I use a reference book. Will report back after I return.

Lonely Planet is happy to highlight every limit of ebooks and take advantage of none of their strengths. This ebook is not worth buying.

The book is missing essential links like, well, lets start with the Table of Contents. In theory it is there, but the table of contents contains eight items most of which are useless (I am not kidding, half of the links are...picture of the cover, how to use this book, contact us, about the authors, etc.

Even within cities, the links are terrible. In a number of cases, they actually link to the wrong item. Sometimes it jumps to another city! Did any proofread it. Obviously not, they just wanted to make more money.

The book itself is ok. Coverage of the north is good, coverage of the south is extremely sparse. A random city in the north, say Udaipor, might have 20 hotels listed. A comparable city in the south might have three. Take the City of Ooty (Udhagamanadalam). It is a trekking town (The book reads, "Trekking is pretty much de rigueur in Ooty and the reason most travelers come here). And then they don't recommend any guides or places to go.

This is repeated all over the south.

The guide is also pretty out of date. Prices were two to four times the listed price.

Buy the print edition or buy something else, this ebook is not worth it.

Just used this title traveling in India. The weight saving was a godsend of course but I found myself continually frustrated by the clumsy way this has been converted to ebook format. The most glaring issue was the really poor implementation of maps - often fragmented for no apparent reason at times and really poor resolution so often unreadable even when expanded.
Would still buy again for the convenience but could have been so much better.

I purchased this ebook in the hope that it would compare with the printed version (and to lighten my travel bag), and was very disappointed. I typically buy Lonely Planet guidebooks and I do appreciate their detailed coverage and practical advice. However the Kindle version does not even come close to the experience of reading the paper copy for many reasons. I tried using it on my Kindle device, on my Android phone, and also on my Windows PC. It didn't matter which device I used - they all were way less than satisfactory. Here are some of the reasons:

1. Bookmarks are good for reading books, but not for tagging pages of a travel guide because the bookmark navigation only shows the first sentence of two from the page. Half the time this is not helpful to figure out what was bookmarked, especially basic information like which city or region this page refers to. And when I click on the bookmark to see, it still is not always obvious which section I am reading (see #4).

2. You cannot view two pages at once (side by side) on the PC application so browsing one page at a time is slow and makes it challenging to refer back to the previous (related) page. For example when you are examining a schedule of train times and distances that spans two pages.

3. This book makes major use of links between pages. However it is too easy to follow a link on Kindle for Android to another page in the book, and accidentally hit the phone's back/previous button and end up closing the app. The Kindle Back button is hidden in a menu, requiring two clicks, and my natural tendency is to click the back (hardware) button on the bottom of my phone.

4. When browsing and reading a travel guide I tend to skip around a lot to find interesting places to visit or useful advice. In this case it is too easy to lose track of which city or region I am reading about and there is no visual indicator as to which section of the book I am currently viewing (like highlighted in the table of contents on the left). For example I might be at a page titled "Eating and Drinking" but I cannot tell what city it refers to.

6. Links to "Offline Map" go to the map in the book which is helpful when roaming without a data plan. However the link does not mention which numbered icon on the map is the restaurant, hotel, or attraction in question. You must page forward several times (past the blurry zoomed in map sections) to get to the list of items and then go back to the map, finally remember to hit the Back button to return to the previous section of the book.

I now realize that travel guides to individual cities are great on the Kindle, however ones that are of this scope and magnitude are not useful in electronic format the way Kindle works today. I hope improvements in the future will offer a better reading experience for these type of travel guidebooks so they are not treated like novels.

A great book with a lot of useful information. I will be in India for two weeks so I know this book will help me and the people going with me get the best of our experience there.