Here’s another interesting example of publishing on demand: Offbeat Guides is a brand new service promising to deliver travel guides customized to your travel plans. The site asks five questions about your trip, then quickly generates a PDF with general destination information, specific weather and event information for the dates you’re visiting that destination, and other tips based on how you’ve answered the questionnaire. The PDF is available nearly immediately for $9; a printed version can also be had for about $25 plus shipping. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has a full rundown of Offbeat Guides, including a video interview with founder Dave Sifry and an example guide for Paris.

Aside from the extreme personalization of the guide, a few things strike me as particularly interesting about this venture. First, the basic model of on-demand publishing, coupled with the methods in which Offbeat Guides acquire and use data, makes for publications that wouldn’t be feasible through traditional publishing. As Mr. Sifry notes, Offbeat Guides is probably offering the first robust travel guide for Carlsbad, California ever (with 30,000 locations available, I wonder if Lawrence made the cut?). Topics seen as unprofitable by traditional publishing houses can make money in this model.

Second, Offbeat Guides is taking advantage of freely available information to create the illustrated event guides, maps, weather forecasts, and other features of each guidebook. In return, they’re developing their own databases of travel-related information and making them freely available to others. Offbeat Guides is quite open in noting that the information in these books is available for free online–they are selling convenience, not information.

Finally, of course, I ask how this concept applies to how the CRL shares information. Could customized SIM manuals, for example, be in our future? Might a teacher or administrator complete a questionnaire and receive a PDF of Learning Strategies and Content Enhancement routines particular to the needs of a classroom or school? Could readers for Fusion or other reading programs be developed based on what a kid says he’s interested in? How else might this concept be used in what we do?

Offbeat Guides aren’t yet available to the public. I’ve registered for an invitation, though (you can, too), and hope to get access before my trip to Chicago in a few weeks. If it works out, I’ll share my experience with the service here.

Tags: pdf, publishing