Moments in the Electronic Travel Publishing Revolution: A Participant’s Journey

By Lee Foster

I have been privileged to participate in some critical moments in the electronic publishing revolution in travel journalism, going back to 1980.

Most recently, at the end of 2009, I was in the first wave of authors to have my own travel app published. My first title in the Apple iTunes App Store was San Francisco Travel Photo Guide. It became a best seller in the app store. I now have four apps in the app store. (I discuss apps in detail in the article Apps and the Future of Travel Journalism.)

My adventure in app publishing is only the latest episode in my pilgrimage in electronic travel content publishing going back to 1980. This article recounts some of the earlier moments.

The main inspiration for all this was my father, Russell Gordon Foster, who lived in the 1970s in his little “electronic cottage” on Lake Washington, near Mankato, Minnesota. He was always taking delight in the new technologies, both hardware and software. He had some of the first computers, some of the first word processing and calculation software, and one of the first portable telephones. His excitement about all this and his wonderment about where it was heading always engaged me. The marvel of human existence in our time is partly expressed in the rapid technological development all around us. This is a wondrous aspect of our modern life, and is celebrated in my travel literary book Travels in an American Imagination: The Spiritual Geography of Our Times.

Here are some moments in my own wanderings in the electronic publishing universe:

-1980: I purchased one of the first Osborne computers, which was one of the first computers that had all the necessary components in a relatively portable or at least “luggable” package.

Prior to that time all books, including two books of my own, were written out one keystroke at a time on a typewriter. When the manuscript was marked up and revised, the entire document had to be typed out once again. I remember my astonishment when I was back at my father’s cottage in the 1970s and he showed me his early Apple and Radio Shack computers. I recall typing in my first article, one on Yellowstone, printing it out, then pausing with a glass of wine out on his deck, marking up the manuscript, correcting it on the computer, and then doing a fresh printout. I remember him saying, “This was a breakthrough year, Lee. Isn’t it wonderful that this year the computer keyboard finally has both upper and lower case, like a typewriter?”

When I went back to California, I remember going to a technology show and finding many people hovering over a little suitcase-type device, called the Osborne. It had all the components one would need for a fully functioning computer in a small portable package. I bought one of the first off the assembly line, a brown case Osborne, which I still have, and which is now a collectible.

-1981: I published a travel guidebook that was one of the first books to be typeset from a computer disk.

I soon had my Osborne hooked up to my IBM Selectric typewriter to give crisp printouts. But could the computer be taken to the next level? Could the file also be a part of the production of a book? I became aware of a breaking technology with which a book could actually be laid out from a computer disk, if you put in the proper codes, and then printed out the book on a glossy typesetting paper. At the time I was involved with Presidio Press for a guidebook, ironically, to the Silicon Valley region, titled Making the Most of the Peninsula. Doing the layout and typesetting of the book was quite expensive, about $3,200 in 1981 dollars, mainly because the book had to be manually keyboarded in to the typesetting machine. I made a proposal to Presidio, “What if I can get the book satisfactorily laid out and typeset from my computer? How about paying me half of the savings?” The people who had the new technology were interested in promoting it, so they partnered with me, charging me only for the shiny paper. I put in the sweat equity of coding. I managed to get the entire book laid out and typeset to Presidio’s specs for $200. Presidio wrote me a check for $1,500 additional author dollars. I was the author with a “value added” function. As another substantial benefit, the computer didn’t inject any “new errors” in the manuscript, so I and Presidio didn’t have to proof the book once again. Even the most skilled typesetters of the time sometimes introduced inadvertent errors.

-1983: I became the first travel writer to earn a dollar in the new online milieu, signing a contract with CompuServe to put all my travel writing online in their system, in return for a 10% royalty of their then “premium content” fees. CompuServe sent me a monthly check for the next 18 years.

At the time, there were two online players, CompuServe and The Source. This was before AOL became prominent. I approached both CompuServe and The Source about putting my travel content on their system in return for a royalty fee. The Source was not interested. CompuServe was. So I began uploading my travel articles, which their users could download at painfully slow rates. All was text only, of course. No graphics. When CompuServe moved to a fixed-fee per month, rather than connect-time charges for premium content, my agreement with them changed to a fee-per-month. Finally, as CompuServe declined, they gradually dropped all their premium content providers. My final month in this 18-year relationship was in January 2001.

-1991: I had one of the first “books” to be sold on a computer disk, presented by a new software, hypertext markup language, or html.

About 1991 I was approached by a software company in Boston, called Boston Developers, with a proposal. They had seen my work on CompuServe and were aware that I had a lot of travel content digitally ready, especially covering California. They were developing a new software that they called “hypertext markup language” or html. Their main customer was Toshiba computers, which was selling about 1.25 million units a year. I happened to be using a Toshiba computer myself, at that point. They said they were doing something revolutionary, which was to put the manual for the computer in the box not as a printed manual, but as a manual on a computer disk. The computer buyer would “read” the manual on the disk rather than as a printed book. As part of their deal, Toshiba was willing to put in each box a flier from them about some other kind of “book” on a computer disk, run by their html software. So they approached me about putting a California Travel disk together, with my content. I provided the text-only content. They did all the software presentation. We completed the project, and the flier was put in the box of every Toshiba that went out. The California Travel disk was for sale for $19.95. They got a reasonable return of buyers, about 1% of the 1.25 million units that went out that year. Orders came in from Brazil and Japan and Europe because Toshiba was then a major worldwide computer supplier. The project was proof-of-concept. It was possible to create and sell a “book” on a computer disk, using their html software.

-1993: I had one of the first travel guides to be presented with a new technology, the CD-ROM. The “book” had a text and a thousand photos, something revolutionary, compared to a printed book.

About 1993 another new technology emerged, the CD-ROM, or “compact disk read-only memory.” This was an innovation because of the huge amount of space on the medium. The limit of the lack of space on a computer disk was no longer a constraint. The CD-ROM had what seemed like infinite space on it. This meant that graphics could be added to a text in an abundant amount. I was approached by a company called Ebook, one of the first consumer CD-ROM product developers, to use my California Travel writing and 1,000 of my photos illustrating it. They would scan the photos and put them on the CD-ROM, tying the photos to the text. They had a ready market. In a deal with Radio Shack, they had a guaranteed sale of two units to each of the 5,000 Radio Shack stores. The project was a success in the brief period, before the Internet became viable, when CD-ROM products were all the rage. I still have some copies of the California Travel CD-ROM that they produced. This is now a collectible. The CD-ROM came in a jewel case. The jewel case was packaged inside a rather large cardboard box, with beautiful printing on the outside. It was felt that the CD-ROM was so slim and small that the consumer would be more inclined to buy if it was packaged in a large cardboard box.

-1995: I started one of the first viable travel publishing sites on the World Wide Web. My site is www.fostertravel.com and now contains about 200 worldwide coverages of travel articles/photos. The site was transformed in 2009 from an html site to become a modern WordPress site.

The Web took some time to catch on, partly because the commercial online systems provided a sense of community. You had to know where to find things on the Web in the era before sophisticated search engines. But always there were new sites coming on, and there has always been an excitement about what will be next for the Internet. In the first years, words dominated. Then photography became prominent. Finally, video became possible. All this change has occurred in only a few years.

And now a new type of product, an app for a mobile phone, has caught our attention. These technological advances are a main reason why, in my opinion, this is the most wondrous time ever to be alive, even if this era is also the most horrific time, given the many challenges we face.

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