There has been a topic that is about a month old now. I have written about it before, but it is still an open wound. The fact is that Google has bought out Frommer's or more precisely John Wiley & Sons portion of anything travel related, but nothing has been shared with any of the authors.
Yesterday, I had the thought to try to find other Frommer's authors. It is not like they have ever provided us with a list, though to be honest, I had never asked directly either. I had mentioned to an editor or two how great it would be to be able to be in touch with the other authors of say the Europe by Rail book, the Eastern Europe, or the Europe book. Although there were three different editors involved, none of them responded with any encouragement; the matter fell flat. I could have take the normal route of writing to Frommer's in NJ knowing they would have forwarded the letter to a particular author at some point in time, generally too far into the future for me to have remembered writing at all. Those that sent letters in regarding the Hungary book, generally arrived in my mail months and months after being sent to the publisher.
Just by chance, I thought I would Google "Frommer's Authors" and see what came up. What I had hoped for was to find other Frommer's authors who may have heard more information than I have or we could just share notes.
What I discovered was a rather well thought out blog that addressed the issue in a post called "Why Google will most likely kill Frommer’s, and why that’s probably a mistake". You can find it here. I did send him a comment stating that his fourth possibility was ethnocentric. Google cannot keep up with the changes in the Hungarian website world, since many of the shops and small restaurants have no web presence.
Another blog I found has the post "Google buys Frommer's - What's next?". The writer of this blog is another Frommer's author for Seville and Andalusia, Spain. You can read his thoughts here.
One would like to think that out of professional courtesy at least, there would be something from the corporate office of Wiley or Google sharing some morsel of information. I am going to post in the travel writers group on LinkedIn and see if that garners any info. I will keep you posted.
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