Frommer’s Travel Books are not dead…

Founder Arthur Frommer has bought his brand name back from Google, and he plans to continue publishing the printed guides. After Google announced that they were closing down the printed product of these guides a quick response from the original owner may  guarantee publishing will begin again. Hopefully. When I was in the service I had several of his printed guide books in my car as we toured around Europe on the weekends. However with today’s electronic devices do we really need to have a physical book to be reading from? I have already purchased eBook guides that I use to get around different towns that my wife and I explore and I use either my phone or my Nexus 7 to be able to read them and this works out pretty well.

Frommer’s was founded in 1957 and has changed hands several times over the decades. Simon & Schuster bought the brand in 1977, and it shuffled through a handful of publishers before landing at John Wiley & Sons in 2001. Wiley said in March 2012 that it would sell off several of its publishing assets in a bid to re-focus the company, and Google bought Frommer's five months later.