On the Open Road

One of the criticisms commonly levelled at free content is that it cannibalises existing paid-for content in a way that is economically unsustainable. So it's good to see this kind of development as a counter-example:

The founders of Wikitravel (www.wikitravel.org), the Webby Award-winning online travel guide, today announced the launch of Wikitravel Press (www.wikitravelpress.com), a company for publishing Wikitravel content in book form.

Wikitravel uses the wiki-based collaborative editing technology made popular by Wikipedia. Wikitravel guides are built on the principle that travelers often get their best information from other travelers. The website offers over 30,000 travel guides in seventeen languages, with over 10,000 editorial contributions per week. Wikitravel won the Best Travel Website category in the 2007 Webby Awards.

Wikitravel Press builds upon this extraordinary community participation to create continually updated, reliable guidebooks, combined, abridged or changed by paid editors, published on demand and shipped anywhere in the world. Wikitravel Press will hire book editors to assemble relevant destination guides, abridge or expand them, and do final copy-editing and fact-checking.

(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)