Lonely Planet India 30th Ed.: 30th Edition [Paperback]

One of the reasons I bought a Kindle was because I take a three week trip every year and have grown tired of lugging around 10 lbs. of books. I like to take long distance trains, and I like to read on the train.

Theoretically the Kindle should be ideal for travel guides. Light, searchable, what could go wrong? Apparently, quite a lot.

In sum, here are the problems with the Kindle version of this travel guide:

1. Maps are unreadable. Either they are condensed onto one page (with miniscule type that is unreadable with a magnifying glass. I actually took a magnifying glass and tried to read it. I couldn't) or split haphazardly where one map is on several pages.

2. Lists are unreadable. Apparently, no one paid attention to formatting the page margins of, say, the list of trains that leave Delhi. The name of the train is listed, as is the fare, but then it cuts off, literally in mid-word. It costs 200 rupees to go to Udai...> Where exactly? I think it means Udaipur, but I can't be sure. Also, I have no idea how long it takes to get to Udai.... This is true for every single such list in the book.

3. The table of contents doesn't really work. Links are nonintuitive and don't really work. In some sections links work differently than the analagous links in other sections.

4. In fact, searching the book is pretty much useless. If you enter Pushkar, it gives you a list of every time the word "Pushkar" appears in the book. Introduction, side notes, glossary, it doesn't care. It also gives you a tiny snippet of text, but not enough to identify if clicking on that will take you to the section on Pushkar, where you can find a hotel, or the index, or some inane note in the beginning in a section about agricultural fairs in India where Pushkar gets mentioned.

All in all, the job of taking this from the print to the Kindle format seems to have been done haphazardly, by separate teams of IT people that apparently never talked to each other, nor compared notes. Additionally, and this I find really unbelievable, apparently no one at LP actually proofread this book. The map and list problems aren't minor. They jump out at you about five minutes after you start reading the book, and they persist.

So, after dropping twenty bucks or so on this thing, I actually had to go and spend more money to pick up the print copy. So I paid for the book, twice.

As far as content goes, it's pretty decent. LP standard, which is better than most. But as far as buying the Kindle edition goes, I cannot recommend against it strongly enough.

I used the 14th Edition of Lonely Planet India to get around in India (of course) for four weeks in October 2011. Overall, I liked how LP reorganized and reordered the info in the book. I thought the manner in which they listed sights, hotels, and restaurants, etc. was better than their previous method, having used past LP's to travel elsewhere. I also found the information in the book to be accurate and agreed with most of their descriptions of hotels and places to eat.

The one point that I did not like in this edition was that LP seems to have lessened the geographic size of the maps in the book, and also eliminated some helpful maps that were in the 13th edition (e.g. various maps of the Darjeeling area). So instead of a map showing a larger portion of a city or several different areas of a city, you now get a map showing only the city center/one area but with more detail. In prior versions of the India guide, LP's maps covered larger and more diverse areas. Some people may like the extra detail of the smaller maps, but I personally liked the broader map coverage of past editions.

I have travelled to India 10 times so far and been using Lonely Planet India guidebooks for 7 years, got my first one in 2004. I was very happy with them and each new edition was getting better and better, basically new places and maps were added, the book was expanding. The last 13th edition (published in Sept 2009) had 250 maps, they were very clear, showing often much more than just the city centre only, LP got it just right. I was very happy seeing a release of the new edition, as I am planning two trips to India very soon. Ordered the new guidebook and.. couldn't believe my eyes. LP changed their excellent maps! They are not as clear as they used to be, I find reading these new maps very hard, they use blue symbols now and road are marked in grey. Also maps are often much smaller, in the previous edition they covered much larger areas of cities. Also some maps are simply GONE, so there are quite a few cities without maps. The front cover of the 13th edition says "250 detailed and easy to use maps", in the new edition it is just written "196 maps" in small letters on the back cover (so 54 maps are gone?). They do not say "detailed and easy to use" anymore - not so proud about the maps this time? If it is not enough then imagine that some cities featured in the 13th edition are just gone, they are not in the book anymore (for example Daman in Gujarat).
What is new? The first 82 pages are in colour, so you get colorful maps of Delhi. There are also perspective plans/sketches of Taj Mahal and Red Fort, like the ones in the DK guides. I like them, but I feel they were added at the expense of the maps and places that got removed from the book. Each state has a different introduction too. And there is a fold-out map of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Basically everything is quite different now. We also get 1232 pages vs 1244 pages in the older edition. Also the paper quality is worse and the cover damages easily.
Also there is much less hotels listed and they are not grouped by a budget, midrange and top end category as before, but is some other confusing order.
I don't understand why changing a winning formula?
My advice? If you are going to visit sth more than Delhi and Agra then skip the 14th edition, get yourself the previous one. For my next trip to India I will be using again the 13th edition, the new one stays at home. I hope they get it right in the 15th one, but before bying it I will go to a bookshop and see how it's like. I hope they return to the previous form of maps and add more cities.
To summarize it: I might sound harsh, but I don't like this edition, it is a step back comparing to the previous one (or maybe just step in the wrong direction). 1 star from me, wasted money, as I will not use it for my future trips.

update: LP seems to use this new design for other guidebooks - just got the latest 11th edition of Myanmar guidebook and it is as bad as the new India guide, what a shame...