Save out of print guidebooks!

I personally have been concerned with the trend of climbing information progressively becoming more and more digital, with fewer alternatives. In my opinion, this digitization is different from the mountain project of old, as the data is all owned by private companies. This data can be removed at any point in time should the company decide to. While I don't think that is a pressing concern, I think the climbing community should put more importance in ensuring information is preserved and available to the general public. One important part of this is preserving the immense amount of work that guidebook authors put into their books. While books do get out-of-date and less useful over time, they are still an immensely valuable resource, for historical purposes if nothing else.

I am a member of the Free Ebook Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to cataloging, and maintaining free ebooks for the entire world. I believe with the help of the Ebook Foundations tools and some support from the climbing community, we can quickly preserve just about all climbing related text that is no longer in print. So what needs to be done to make this happen?

First and foremost, any book that we would like to catalog MUST be properly licensed. We can not legally, or in good faith, distribute books that do not have a free and open license. In my opinion, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license is the most appropriate ( creativecommons.org/license…) but this will ultimately be up to the author's discretion.

Second, the media will need to be digitized. This will require original source from the author, or scans from a physical copy. This can only start AFTER the first step is complete. Once this is done, the digital book can be distributed to several free online libraries including unglue.it and ibiblio. This, in addition to personal downloads, would all but ensure the text is not permanently lost should a service or provider go down.

So, if you are a guidebook author or know of one that is interested in doing this, they can apply for a Creative Commons license ( chooser-beta.creativecommon…) or reach out to me and I can help get the process started. I am very willing to contribute time and money to this project, just need to get the process started and get the right permissions.

I have a large 1200 dpi scanner, a full adobe license, and would absolutely like to help with this project.

I'd also be willing to host these as torrents through a central site with my seedbox.

Jeremiah Whitewrote:

I have a large 1200 dpi scanner, a full adobe license, and would absolutely like to help with this project.

I'd also be willing to host these as torrents through a central site with my seedbox.

Really appreciate it! I will be sure to reach out if/when we need some scanning done.

I think this is a good idea, but maybe the emphasis should be guides that cover relatively protected public land, like parks. It's just that circumstances can change quite a bit regarding access and other context. For example, I have a 1980's copy of Phoenix Rock. If you read the approach info for Pinnacle Peak, you'll be expecting to drive to a relatively remote area, and park in a gravel lot behind the Pinnacle Peak Patio restaurant and hike up to the climbs from there. If you show up, the Patio is long gone. You will find a gated development of massive houses, a Four Seasons hotel, a constrained hiking park, with some climbing still open, but one of the best crags closed. I also have an old South Platte guide but haven't been to the Platte in a long time. I bet I'd run into some surprises (e.g., Sphinx Rock?). On the other hand, my 1980's Vedauwoo guide was sufficient when I visited in the 2010's or so.

Thanks for the feedback Jay! This is actually a concern I have heard from a few people, and here is my response to it.

In my opinion, it should be quite obvious that beta from 45 years ago will potentially be out of date. Approach beta changes, holds break, bolts are added/removed. All of this should be expected. While it would be worthwhile to have a notice/warning alongside these older books to ensure there are no access issues, I don't think we should refrain from preserving these texts because they are out of date. Additionally, I personally find it very interesting to read beta from older books to see how the area has changed over time. I would view this archive more as a historical record, than a practical way to find new climbs, though it certainly should accomplish both.

 If you have any other thoughts on this subject, or ideas for how to avoid potential access issues, please don't hesitate to share them!

I fully support your endeavor LW II; first as a resource of hard-to-find information, but more importantly to preserve history. I have a small library of old guides I'd like to see in a good home, but currently don't know where that would be - possibly the AAC library? 

Note that for many books, the publisher, not the author, holds the copyright.

Your idea to combat digital guidebook monopolies (like this one) is to digitize old guidebooks?

Kent Peasewrote:

I fully support your endeavor LW II; first as a resource of hard-to-find information, but more importantly to preserve history. I have a small library of old guides I'd like to see in a good home, but currently don't know where that would be - possibly the AAC library? 

Note that for many books, the publisher, not the author, holds the copyright.

Appreciate the support Kent! As far as preserving the books, I am also not sure of the best place to do that. From what I can tell, the AAC library is not accepting book donations at this time. May be best to just hang on to them yourself until AAC opens up donations again.

To you final note, this is definitely an important piece of information. I assume this will make the entire process much harder, but also gives me another way to reach out and get the conversation started.

Cherokee Nuneswrote:

Your idea to combat digital guidebook monopolies (like this one) is to digitize old guidebooks?

The idea outlined in this post is not quite just combating digital guidebooks monopolies. It is intended to preserve historical climbing information, and open access to otherwise rare or hard to find guides. It of course would not adequately compete with a modern alternative like Kaya for getting up to date beta and that is not the goal.

I also want to highlight a massive difference in community hosted digital material vs. digital material hosted by a company like Kaya or OnX. All the data on Mountain Project is owned by OnX, this means they can alter it, remove it, or put it behind a paywall whenever they choose. On the other hand, data hosted by multiple non-profit entities is much more resilient to being taken down or altered. Theoretically, every single person on MP could download this digital guidebook library, and if a hosting site goes down there would still be hundreds or thousands of copies of the entire library across the world.

In regards to digital guides in general, it is the only path forward that I see. It is simply too expensive and significantly more complicated logistically to try and re-print any of these old guides. Additionally, the physical copies will degrade over time (even if re-printed) and information will be lost. Digitizing things is unequivocally the best path forward from a preservation perspective.

Hey thanks for clarifying. Good luck with your project.

As a slight aside b/c it was brought up: for the MP gods if you’re listening, I personally would not pay for MP. Perfectly happy (often happier) exploring on my own, finding an old guidebook - in fact two of my current go to’s are 20+ year old paper books that are out of print (actually like them better than MP for a number of reasons), or just head to an area and meet up with some locals the old fashioned way.

After delivering newspapers to people who had a hard time coming up with $2 a month as a youth and now paying hundreds of times that amount to maintain a 3 day a week subscription for my father it’s pretty clear print is dead. This is the only path I see to preserve stuff like old guide books.