The Tranquilo Traveler
The Tranquilo Traveler is a celebration of voluntourism, slow travel, and other interesting ways to see the world. Travel writer and award- winning Moon Handbooks author Joshua Berman created The Tranquilo Travel as a resource for world trippers and international volunteers, a window to the author’s travels in Nicaragua, Belize, and beyond, and an update of his books and articles.
Blogosphere buzzes with juicy Lonely Planet guidebook scandal!
By Joshua | April 13th, 2008 | 
5 Comments » 
I posted a brief blip a few weeks ago about the allegedly scandalous upcoming title from Random House, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm. Since then, lurid morsels of the sex and sin to come have been dangled in the press, as well as the swift responses by fellow guidebook authors, even though few of us have read the book yet:
–CNN: “Travel writer tells newspaper he plagiarized, dealt drugs”
–BBC: “Lonely Planet rebuts ‘fake’ claim”
–New Zealand Herald: “More sex than Paeroa”
The bloggers respond:
–Brave New Traveler: Do LP Writers Go to Hell? Thomas Kohnstamm Might
–Gadling: “5 Reasons to be Outraged by the Lonely Planet Fraud”
–David Stanley: “Lonely Planet Author Unmasked”
–First mention on the Tranquilo Traveler
Writes David Stanley regarding the plagiarism allegations, “To save money and maintain full control, Lonely Planet often assigns inexperienced office clerks and interns to update their guides. Little wonder that some of these underpaid novices resort to plagiarism. My books have been copied by Lonely Planet writers time and again … Today Lonely Planet updaters get no royalties and must sign away all rights, even moral rights. Thus it’s no surprise that the quality of Lonely Planet guides is so uneven.”
5 Responses to “Blogosphere buzzes with juicy Lonely Planet guidebook scandal!”
The Lonely Planet Thorntree forum responded to postings about this scandal by moving them all off their regular branches and segregating them to a separate, hard to find unless you are specifically looking for it branch.
[…] Instead, the 33 year old writer says he got the information from a Colombian intern he was dating at the time - seriously hurting the reputation of the BBC Worldwide owned series. Had Kohnstamm said the same thing 50 years ago it wouldn’t even have been a story. As Tom Brosnahan once told me, before the 70s, most travel writers never left their living rooms. […]
Bout time someone outed you travel writer hippies!
This is such a shame but was anyone really surprised? I don’t think sales will be hurt by this. Sales started hurting a long time ago as more travel information became available on the internet. It’s much more convenient to pay a few dollars to find the information on the web than to lug that big book around.
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You forgot: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/travelog/2008/04/the_lessthanlonely_planet.html