Customer Reviews

Ultimate Guide to Mountain Biking (Ssm Freesports)

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Long on great photos, short on everything else. Although this might be the perfect book for bike shops to give to prospective buyers to get them breathing heavy and dreaming of catching air. The book generates the most power when just flipping through it, thereby letting you imagine that you too might be able to ride in such glorious locations or with this sort of athletic aplomb. It will definitely stir you to get out there and ride.
But what it won't do is give you much instruction or insight into technique. The magazine-like spreads usually have only a few paragraphs of text so the authors are constrained as to how much they can explain.
There's another reason behind the scarcity of text - in publishing circles, this is what's referred to as a packaged book. Therein, an enterprising designer lays out a few spreads and a table of contents and the publisher tries to sell the foreign language rights to as many other publishers around the globe. By leaving lots of white space, the layout can accommodate even mega-syllabic German translation. This is the only way publishers in small countries can afford costly four-color printing as all the various editions are ganged together to print in the same run. But for any US reader, this is why we get the British "colour" and "tyre" because we Yanks don't even qualify for a copy-edit to correct this imperial curiosities.
All that said, on a cold and sleety day like this, the book served quite nicely for a 20 minute escape, stirring dreams of days forthcoming when I can reading the line of a single-track trail with handlebars in my hands instead of reading lines of type with a book in my hands.