However, there are a lot of challenges to the medium. A travel guide has a huge amount of information (our Chicago guide is over 400 pages) which can be extremely difficult to navigate on a handheld device. Squinting at text on a tiny screen can be really uncomfortable.

If you do content on-line, it requires that the device be connected, which can be costly and isn’t always easy in remote locations. If you do content for download, it ages out just like a book. Delivery formats are hard to standardize on — PDF, HTML (or a variant thereof), or some custom app format for the mobile provider?

Printed guides are convenient; easy to navigate; don’t require batteries or an Internet connection; and you can read them anywhere. We’re using print-on-demand technology to make up-to-date versions of our guides available quarterly or monthly — a huge advantage over traditional guide books.

Most of all, the business proposition is clear. People are very willing to pay hard money for a physical thing like a printed book; they’re less likely to want to pay for a digital object when the contents are available for free on the Web.

But I don’t think it’s an either-or situation, and I think it’s likely that Wikitravel guides will have customized versions for mobile sometime in the near future. I think that it’d probably be a last-recourse medium for people in a new destination (“I’m in Venice, and I need to find a bar NOW!”) rather than their main way of getting and carrying travel information.