Lonely Planet iPad Versions Released

Lonely Planet, the big travel publisher with the great little books, has released their first five ebook titles to the iBooks store that lets you read ebooks on your iPad. Lonely Planet Discover guides are for Great Britain, Italy, Spain, France and Ireland are the ones available, and odds are there will be many more, since this is a great use of the iPad. You could download and store all 5 guides on your device and throw all the paper copies away, saving a lot of room in your backpack. Plus they are interactive, containing over 300 hyperlinks to websites of hotels, restaurants and other local attractions.

The iBooks app you new to install to read these also runs on your iPhone and iPod touch, which means that these guides could take up even less space in your backpack or suitcase. The introductory price for the guides is 14.99$ each.

Lonely Planet will not have the market to itsel for long; later this month Fodor’s will release it’s first four e-guidebooks covering national parks. Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, and the Grand Canyon and other areas in Arizona and California will mark their foray into the iPad world, as well as all the main e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.