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The famous Rough Guide travel book brand, the series that has led   a gap year and independent traveller to exotic climes to hang out with other gap year and independent traveller types, has sensibly started experimenting with podcasting.

In an article in the Sunday Telegraph*, Marc Zakian writes about Rough Guide’s plans to launch iToors: audio tours of famous places. A fantastic and obvious idea: there’s a massive market for audio guide books: check out just about any major tourist attraction’s trade in Walkmans, phone like "audio tour sticks" etc. one of the company’s first tours is a literary guide to London or a "Serpentine journey into the heart of London’s literary depths”:

Armed with a Tube pass, tourists are guided to literary locations in Soho and Chelsea. The information is intelligent, enriched with music and delivered with lively voice-overs – though British ears may baulk at "Graham Greene” speaking with an American accent.

As well as the Rough Guide offering, Mr Zakian also discusses a mobile phone version of the same idea from a company called Hand Held Tours, who charge £5 a pop for an audio tour via your mobile phone.

I was interested by the comment from Richard Trillo, director at Rough Guides that this was still early days for iPods as a medium:

"There is some way to go before iPods and mobiles replace the guidebook. Batteries are fallible, screens are tiny and you can’t easily refer to a specific item in a podcast. And it remains to be seen whether, and how much, the public will be prepared to pay for audio-visual guides.”

He’s right. It won’t be for everyone, but you can see how easily handheld audio / visual media combinations will edge out guidebooks over the next few years.

Though, if you thought whipping out a guidebook when you got lost and ended up in a dodgy neighbourhood in a strange city was advertising your tourist-grade muggability, imagine what a shiny iPod will do for you…

* I would love to give you the link but can’t find it online and so either the Telegraph new media team need to catch up and post today’s content online, or their search engine is very poor indeed.

technorati tags: podcasting, publishing, travel, books