Lonely Planet India 13th Ed.: 13th edition [Paperback]

I was going to India on my honeymoon and I bought both the Lonely Planet and Fodor's for the planing.

Came back from India about a month ago and ended taking the Fodor's for the trip, not the Lonely Planet. Why?

LP has a lot of very detailed info -mostly quantitative: prices, time tables, etc- that is very useful for planing your trip and is geared to users that travel without an itinerary. This is very good for travelers that are very price conscious, unstructured travelers, backpackers and doitallyourselfers that make decisions on the fly and hence need all of this very detailed info, missed the train to Agra, should I take a bus? Where? How much? The only bus stops at Shimla, should I stay? What is there to see/do?

On the other hand, Fodor's has info of a more quantitative nature, that is more useful when you have a more structured trip. What restaurants to visit, what hotel to stay at, etc. There is a big emphasis on the epicurean traveler, costs be dammed, you see it the way the book is organized, were LP talks about the eateries by zone, Fodor's talks about types of food, no matter were the place is, it is assumed that visiting the place is more important that going to the other side of town to do so.

Whenever I stuck to the Fodor's Choice or the Fodor's Recommends, I was gladly surprised by the quality of the service/place that was recommended, the best restaurants, best bars, best experiences, best hotels in every town, they are all there, I even surprised some locals.

At the end, you have to decide what type of travel you'll be doing and buy accordingly.

(This review is for the 2007 edition of this book.)

Let me start by saying it's possible that LP is still the best guidebook to use in India - it's my understanding that the other books have their shortcomings too. That being said...

I hated this travel guide. It weighs a million pounds, but it seems that 30% of its text could have been cut by a judicious editor. There is so much useless smugness, so much filler, and so many tired attempts at humor I was exasperated. I recommend you pick any page at random in the book and see for yourself all the sentences that could be cut out.

Furthermore, in many cities there were longer descriptions of the hotels than the actual sights. I'd really appreciate some information about what I went to India to see, rather than some cute commentary about the decorations in room 201 of whatever hotel. The guide invariably recommended restaurants that "serve all the backpacker favorites!!" - i.e. crappy restaurants for cheap tourists. Why on earth would you go to India--justifiably famous for its food--and eat a bad imitation of European and Israeli food? (And also why would a guidebook devote so much space to restaurants, period, at the expense of historical/cultural info, when no one is going to hunt down the tiny unmarked lanes that fill all Indian cities to find the mediocre LP-recommended place?)

The guide also had a number of errors and omissions - some really embarrassing. In Amritsar I went into a building LP said housed a museum to find bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling and people sleeping on the floor. Pretty sure that hadn't been a museum for years and years! I see in the new edition that this has been corrected.

The book had good basic information about sights but I can't recommend it for much else. Not sure if the other big guides (Rough Guides, Footprint) are any better.

I was a bit of a fan of Lonely Planet Guide Books until I bought a Kindle Edition of The India Guide.

One of the strong point of the the LP books is usually the maps. It was really an attractive idea that I would be able to carry all my books in one compact electronic gadget.

All was well until I tried reading the maps. They were impossible! Without the capacity to zoom they were impossible to read. I was lost. Maybe a magnifying glass would have helped, but I pretty well gave up. So to Kindle and LP I say that you desperately need to do something about the maps for Kindle. They are useless.

They could work better on the Kindle DX, but then its not so convenient for traveling.