My eBookshelf has three new touring-related publications, one of which mentions me!

From left to right, the first two – The Bike Touring Survival Guide & Bike Touring – come from the Travelling Two stable and the first of those – the survival guide – is only a free sample and contains 23 of the 239 available if you pay the 5 euros (which I may well do). You’d be hard pressed to find anything more encyclopedic on the subject of bike touring and the whole publication is set out as a series of FAQs addressing almost every issue you could possibly think of ranging from such fundamentals as deciding what to pack through to more technical issues such as making your stove more efficient (assuming you didn’t leave it in a hotel in Luxembourg – see cycling day 8 of my book, Good Vibrations!). The question marks at the end of some of the FAQs are a bit erroneous for example ‘Wierd questions people will ask me?’ but that bit of grammatical pedantry aside, I shall certainly spend a bit of time today sliding my finger across the iPad screen to see what I can find out and then consider buying the whole document. Travelling Two’s other publication – Bike Touring – is free and is a kind of does the same thing as the survival guide but, by the looks of it, in a bit more detail and with a bit more subjectivity taking on board the opinions of various touring cyclists. One of Reggie’s brothers gets a look in on page 43; the Ridgeback Panorama is one of the bikes listed as worth considering for a long journey in the saddle. Again, I’ll be reading in more detail while horizontal on the sofa later today. Both publications are available via the Travelling Two website (which itself is worth exploring at length).

The third item on the eBookshelf is the second edition of the Dutch (English language) magazine Bicycle Traveler which is free – see the website. Edited by Grace Johnson who was kind enough to send me a copy directly for having contributed a quote (more of that in a second), it is 36 pages of stories, photos, reviews and an interview with Josie Dew (carried out by FreeWheelingFrance.com‘s Lynette Eyb of all people). It ends with a short piece called ‘Longing for… What do cyclists miss on their trips?‘. If you want to know what I said, turn to page 33. Gorgeous photos…

All three publications make me want to be out there cycling off to some far off destination, not sitting here typing this, but as work beckons me back on Monday morning, I shall have to be just a little bit patient…

Update: 11:30am, Saturday 21st January 2012

One of the ‘Travelling Two’ has commented below with a clarification of the difference between the two publications mentioned above. It’s worth promoting the comment to the body of the post;

Thanks for the mention!
To clarify the difference between the two books, the Bike Touring Survival Guide is much longer than Bike Touring Basics. Topics are generally examined in more detail than in Bike Touring Basics and there’s a special focus on issues related to longer, international trips – especially to less developed countries.
You also get the BIke Touring Survival Guide in 3 formats: one for Kindle (.mobi), one for iPad (.epub) and a high-quality PDF version.
The free Bike Touring Basics mag is a PDF that’s been formatted for the web, so pictures have been compressed to keep the file size small. This means that you may see some pixelation if you try to print it. It also gives a views on gear and specific bikes, which we don’t go into so much for the Bike Touring Survival Guide.
We’ll be updating the Bike Touring Survival Guide later this year, so if you do have any suggestions for it, we’d love to hear them.
Happy reading!