The passing of travel guidebooks? Expected but regrettable, too.

I wanted to travel, but it took Arthur Frommer's Europe on $25 A Day (early 1980s edition) to reassure me that the seemingly impossible was quite capable of achieving, even for a painfully shy hick from somewhere near French Lick. Later came Let's Go and Lonely Planet, and for a long while, I've managed without a sacred text, instead utilizing the many sources mentioned by Rushby. 

Standing on an Athens street corner in 1985 with a copy of Frommer's book in hand may have marked me as a conspicuous touristic rube, but these many years later, I'm entirely free of regrets or embarrassment. One must start at the beginning, and those guidebooks helped me to so just that.

The death of the guidebook will open up new worlds, by Kevin Rushby at The Guardian

The BBC's sale of Lonely Planet is not before time. Guidebooks are a relic of a bygone age that have little to do with travel now.