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Lonely Planet may well have cracked a problem which is vexing all media companies – how to make money online without cannibalising offline sales.

The company is arguably the country’s known publisher of travel guides but very few will realise that it has been at the vanguard of monetising content online ever since it decided, two years ago, to make individual chapters from its books available online.

 Its Head of Emerging Online Business, Troy Suda, reveals that the decision because the publisher was convinced changing travel trends meant there was a new market for ‘bite-sized’ content it could develop.

 “There’s obviously huge demand from people who aren’t going to see an entire country, they just want information for the part they’re going to,” he says.

“It’s particularly true for weekend visitors who are doing city breaks and so want, say, Paris rather than a book for the whole of France. So we realised this presented an online market we could tap in to.”

Download service

Hence nearly two years ago it launched its Pick&Mix service through which online visitors can pick individual chapters to guides. This not only includes individual cities and regions but also chapters on the country’s geography, climate and history which readers may be interested in, even if they are only going to one city.

The obvious question for everybody involved was whether these 80p chapter sales would lesson demand for £16.99 guide books. According to Suda, the publisher has found that they do not.

“You can imagine we were very concerned about cannibalisation and whether people would just buy a handful of chapters and not bother with the physical books,” he says.

“However, we’ve actually found that book sales have remained at the same level but we’re selling around 20,000 chapters per month.”

Showing the way forward

It is an interesting case because publishers across the globe are trying to come up with a way in which they can sell content online (where it is usually give away free) without impacting the sale of physical books, magazines and newspapers.

Some publishers, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, have had success with annual or monthly subscriptions online but not in charging for access to individual stories or chapters. This is an area they are expected to move in to from the autumn onwards and so they will take heart in the news that Lonely Planet claims it is generating 20,000 new, monthly chapter downloads without a reduction in physical book sales.

Interestingly, it is the same destinations of Italy, France, Germany and Spain which account for both the largest number of books orders throughout the year as well as sales of Pick&Mix chapters. Suda puts this down to pressures of time.

“Mainland Europe is strong all year round for short breaks and we think that why there’s a big demand for books as well as online chapter is the time frame people book in,” he says.

“There’s obviously the question of whether you want just the content for the region or city you’re going to but there’s also the point that a lot of city breaks are booked quite late. So, if it’s Thursday night and you’ve just booked a weekend away, you’re probably going to take up the offer of downloading a pdf and printing it out because it’s instant."

Lonely Planet’s chapter downloading service demonstrates how small pieces of content can be successfully sold online but also provides a warning that the information needs to be highly valued by consumers and not available for free elsewhere.