The Lonely Planet Story

There are many business books which describe company founders who had a clear vision and went on to achieve it. Much more refreshing and grounded in realty is "Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story" by Tony Wheeler and Maureen Wheeler. This describes how they collected the notes from one trip and turned that into a travel guide,  eventually building a travel publishing empire. What is refreshing is the descriptions of how much of this happened by accident and the mistakes made along the way. Lonely Planet had several attempts at on-line and mobile publishing which did not work. Rather than rewrite history to say how everything worked, this book details the projects which seemed like a good idea at the time, but which were not.