Welcome to the Lis’s Travel Tips Blog!

Hi and welcome to the new Lis’s Travel Tips blog! This blog is here to promote my eBook series: Lis’s Travel Tips and to provide additional material for my readers.

I’d like to tell you how I got the idea for the Travel Tips series. It was obvious in retrospect I guess. I love to travel, and I love to read. Many times I have filled more than half my pack with books – books are heavy and bulky to carry – well they were. Until eBooks came along.

Amazon has changed the face of publishing. In May 2011 Amazon announced that its sales of eBooks had surpassed that of “dead tree books”  ie both paperbacks and hardbacks. Remember that reading was supposed to be dying, the Internet was supposed to kill it.  In fact book sales have never been better: and times have never been worse for conventional book shops and publishers.  Amazon with the most popular eBook Reader, the Kindle and the biggest collection of eBooks online may have just revolutionized the way will read in the future.

So what the heck is an eBook? For many people its what you read on Amazon’s Kindle – which is the most popular eBook reader.  The Kindle is a no-brainer for those of us who like to combine travel with reading – its lighter than most paperbacks and can go a month between charges, and you can read it in bright sunlight on the beach.

So having bought a Kindle to travel with – I downloaded a  the relevant country  book for  my favorite travel guide book series and was sadly disappointed.   The eBook wasn’t properly formatted – there wasn’t a good index – I couldn’t jump easily to what I needed to see – I couldn’t read the maps.  There was a lot of listings of restaurants and hotels that I actually didn’t need, particularly when I was on the ground. The information that I actually could use: sights, day-trips, transportation details, was there – but it was buried, frustratingly so.

I decided that I could do better. I’ve been online since 2007. I know how to present information on a blog so people can find it, I understand basic html (the technical language that eBooks are formulated in) , and I knew travel very well. In the ancient tradition of authors everywhere – I would write the book that  I wanted to read.

The reason the technology is taking off is quite simple – price and performance. eBook readers are cheap and getting cheaper.  Kindle’s  cost a fraction of the US$399 they originally retailed for in 2007. In fact rumor has it that Amazon may even make a slight loss on the Kindle reader – because the money is in the books. Ever been annoyed at the price of books? Yup me too. They weigh a lot, they cost a lot and I can’t even count the number of books I’ve given away over the years because I just couldn’t afford to take them with me!

A Kindle weighs less than most paperbacks, and eBooks cost as little as US$0.99c on Amazon. Have you ever paid for a classic? You know Jane Austin, Charles Dickens? Do you know they can all be had for free – out of copyright, public domain books are available on Amazon and elsewhere – for nothing. Quite frankly for the $10 you’d typically pay for one paperback you can fill your Kindle with a month’s worth of free and cheap eBooks.

I’m hoping that you’ll fill your eBook reader with my travel guides too. Cheap, to the point, written by someone who has travelled for over 30 years – what’s not to like! Sign up for updates and keep your eye’s glued to your email: Lis’s Travel Tips eBooks – coming to a device near you soon!