Rough Guides
Rough Guides is a publisher. He was known primarily for his guide the Rough Guide series, now the concept has been extended to introductions to other subject areas and a world music label belongs to the publisher. Founded in 1982 by a number of university graduates, Rough Guides belongs since 1998 to Pearson PLC, where it is part of Penguin Books.
The first book, which was published as Rough Guide, was a Greece travel guide from later publishing founder Mark Ellingham, self-published. After the success of the book he published in the following years, Guide to Spain, Portugal, and Mexico for Routledge before 1986 with Martin Dunford founded his own publishing house. He went on a similar concept as the older Lonely Planet. While the Lonely Planet is still concentrated in the 1980s almost exclusively on Asia, the focus was on the Rough Guides Europe. Unlike other guidebooks of the time it went Lonely Planet and Rough Guides not primarily about sights and typical tourist places, but they represented the claim to consider the everyday and subculture of the locals with. Together with Lonely Planet established Rough Guides, a new kind of travel guides: they turned primarily at young people who wanted to explore the world on your own: Rough Guide was one of the pioneer, the individual tourism and backpacker traveling from out the niche market to a mass phenomenon brought. After Mark Ellington had previously expressed his criticism of mass travel, especially by plane, and their harmfulness to the environment several times over the years, he rose in 2007 from Rough Guides and in a Profile Books.
By 2007, more than 300 different guides were published, from its founding to 2007, Rough Guides sold around 30 million books. About 100 authors belong to the permanent staff of the publishing house. Penguin Rough Guides used as a testing ground, as the Verlag 1999 offered free the contents of all 100 then existing guidebooks on his website. 2009, however, saw Penguin controversy: the publisher sign an exclusive contract with the bookstore chain WH Smith, an almost - monopoly on bookshops in railway stations and airports. Then WHSmith leads in his travel book stores only Penguin Guide: Rough Guide is one of two brands that are still available there since summer 2009.