LAST month, just days after the BBC announced the sale of Lonely Planet to a wealthy American investor for an £80m ($121m) loss, Google quietly signed the death sentence for the print publication of Frommer's guidebooks. The remaining portion of the brand will be digested into the corners of the Google network, and the once-famous guidebook series will soon cease to exist. In an era of pop-up restaurants and 140-character updates, guidebook publishing has suffered hugely. Both business and casual travellers do ever more of their trip research online, where sites like Tripadvisor and Wikivoyage can provide free data quickly and precisely. The resulting decrease in book-buying has been disastrous for the publishers. Frommer's US sales dropped from $34m to $18m between 2006 and 2012. Lonely Planet's dropped from $25m to $18m over the same period. Combine those sales figures with the high costs of research and the guidebook-publishing industry's demise looks certain.

Yet there remains some demand for expert travel advice from non-digital sources. Many travellers, particularly those lacking expensive international mobile data plans or access to an internet connection, still rely on physical guidebooks to research and navigate a destination. For example, Chris McGinnis, the editor of the Bay Area Traveler Blog, says he still takes portions of guidebooks with him when visiting a new destination. “Most busy business travellers just want the facts, fast,” he explains. “They don’t always have time to pick through the get-what-you-pay-for free or user-generated sites. Ripping a few pertinent pages out of an edited, fact-checked guidebook and packing them into my carry-on bag still serves me well. But I'm slowly replacing those ripped-up guidebooks with digital versions stored on my iPad.”

The value provided by a well-researched guidebook is precisely why their buyers are willing to pay the extra few dollars for curated content. “Accurate, quality content and information is always in demand,” Daniel Houghton, the new COO of Lonely Planet, told Gulliver. As part of the editorial process, guidebook writers take special measures to review a hotel or restaurant in objective terms. Reviews from sites like Tripadvisor or Yelp, conversely, can be influenced by a host of external factors.

To be successful in the future, guidebooks will need to manage the tricky balance between the content they provide for nothing online and the material they supply in book form, while making both separately profitable. Lonely Planet puts the majority of its content in its physical guidebooks or downloadable products, while hosting a spectrum of digital articles and a community online. Frommer’s, conversely, put the entirety of its guidebook content on the web for nothing; but the growth in its online revenues did not keep pace with the decline in book sales.

Jason Clampet, online editor at Frommer's prior to its sale to Google, explained, “Guidebook companies know that growth will come from digital, but they're all legacy print operations paralysed by fiefdoms and an older skill set. In the same way that we see lots of digital start-ups fall flat on their faces when they try content, old-school content companies just bumble when it comes to digital.” Until there’s a better way for travellers to use guidebook data on their devices, many will continue to shop at their local bookstore for a physical guidebook. But as data plans improve and digital devices evolve, the guidebook publishers will need to adapt to survive.