carry heavy travel info books on year long multiple country RTW?

1. Buy the first one you need and any titles that might be hard to find on the road

2. Buy chapters/PDFs from LP and print them out when you need them then throw/give them away

3. Buy them along the way or trade with other travelers

For pre-trip research use library books and or second hand books

Buy new books as you go. Sometimes books are cheaper in other countries. Eg. India is cheaper to buy in India than at home.

Keep track of when new editions are due out so you don't get caught unnecessarily with an old edition.

When you are doing your research, take some notes or scan a few important pages and put them on a flashdrive or email the info to yourself for easy access when you are over there.

REmember that sometimes you won't be able to print out your document while you may be able to read it. That is a common situaiton in India anyway.

Some Information you may need before you get your book:
location of bookshop
some names and addresses of hotels in city of arrival
transport from airport
issues relating to getting from the airport to where your hotel will be
warnings re scams for new arrivals.

Before you leave one country, try to print out this info or take a few handwritten notes so that you are not caught short on arrival.

Well, you could visit less places.
Or you could forget about books altogether.

Otherwise the answers are the same as they always are when this question is asked. If you come up with a new answer that actually solves this problem, let the world know. No one has so far.

just xerox the accomodation pages and leave the guidebooks at home

you can buy a more general area guide (eg. western Europe, South East Asia on a Shoestring, etc.) and then buy/trade guidebooks on the road for any area where you need a full guidebook.

For example, I'm going to fly from Australia to Indonesia, and then travel overland (by that i mean, no flying - just boats, bus, train, taxi, walking) to london) and i'll be bringing:

• South East Asia on a Shoestring
• Japan
• Europe on a shoestring

for any other destinations, I'll either buy on-the-way, or get mum to send them to me :-)

You can also buy these books in many places - it's not particularly difficult to find LP in, say, Europe, SE Asia (I saw them in bookstores in Singapore and KL), Australia, South Africa, Dubai, North America, etc.

Have you seen those USB keyring storage devices? They're about an inch long, fit on your keyring and can hold up to 4gb of information. My friend just bought one from play.com for £10. That's a real bargain. Now that storage like that is so portable and cheap why not use it to store all the information you've found on the internet? You can even buy lonely planets in .pdf format if I'm not mistaken (.pdf format means it's like a digital book). You can put maps onto it, guides, eBooks, tips you've found... even small videos from the net. What's more you can update it as you go! And at such a cheap price it's possible to have a second as a backup.

As a photographer I always have my laptop on the road but if I didn't this is the way I'd do it. There's always an internet cafe on the road to have a quick scan at the info (or borrow a new found friends laptop) and at most places you can print pages for a small fee. I know it would be prohibitively expensive to print out entire LP's on the road but how often do you actually need a whole guidebook? Quite often (for me anyway) I just need to check visa info, hotel phone number, restaurant location etc. That sort of info can be scribbled into a notebook.

Hope my suggestion helps you.

Actually ric, i don't think its very practical to have it stored on a flashdrive. A palm top would be ok but to have it on a flash drive means you have to be ducking into a internet cafe quite often and the cost would add up very quickly. In some countries its not even convenient to print stuff out, no matter how many internet cafes there are, india for example.

I took a flashdrive with me. I used it to store scanned copies of my passport and other vital documents. I also had a copy on it of some notes i had taken. I also had emailed myself the same notes but found it less than convenient to access them regardless of the method. You just can't beat a book (except iwth a palmtop). When i would go to an internet cafe, i didn't want to be reading through miles and miles of files and notes to find the bit of info that i needed. Luckily I wasn't depending overly much on those notes.

Cut out the only pages you need, staple them together or have them cheaply bound with a card stock cover at a copy store. Basically make your own small book.
Throw pages away as you go. I did this and added my information page and itinerary page with flight numbers and contacts etc..also built a little pocket in the front and back cover (with duct tape). The pocket was good for business cards, postcards, receipts..