Travel Planning Guide

Travel agents are one of those things that the internet was supposed to put out of business 10 years ago, but somehow they're still hanging around. Not like newspapers. Even more shocking is that the travel guide book business still exists. I was scanning through one trying to figure out if it's possible to take ferries among some distant islands and it said, "Coming in 2007, the SuperFerry will offer this trip in less than two hours." Then I jump online to look into it and find out, "The SuperFerry is no longer taking reservations and is refunding all tickets." In the course of six or seven years since this guidebook's been printed, a ferry company launched, stumbled, and folded. The nature of travel and things to do in the places you go is so temporal that putting any of that information in print is tremendous waste of resources. I've heard that less than 1% of all books ever printed in the world still exist, the rest lost to the ages. I take a little bit of solace knowing that many of them were probably travel guides.