Time Out to Guide Booksellers Around NYC

Hotel ABA guests will find their way around the Big Apple a little easier thanks to the Time Out Shortlist New York 2007. The guide to "What's New/What's On/What's Next" in New York will be distributed free to 500 booksellers at Hotel ABA courtesy of the publisher.

The handy, shirt-pocket guidebook, one of Time Out's year-old Shortlist series, is a smaller, less expensive adaptation of the popular Time Out City Guide series, which covers more than 50 major cities worldwide with more venue reviews and background information and a full set of maps.

Founded by Tony Elliott in London in 1968, Time Out began as a local, weekly listings magazine. The business, which is still owned by Elliott, now publishes 20 magazines worldwide, mostly in the local language, and more than 100 titles in its guides series.

Peter Fiennes, managing director of the guides, explained that Time Out's first foray into book publishing was 25 years ago with the London Eating & Drinking Guide. Most of Time Out's books are city guides, but the company has been expanding its range of non-travel publications, with titles like 1000 Films to Change Your Life. "We've just published 1000 Books to Change Your Life," Fiennes said, "and there are more in the pipeline."

To best represent each city's unique flavor, he added, "[Time Out] only uses people who live and work in the city to write for the guides. We provide the framework and the expertise; they provide the local knowledge. It's the magazine model." In both its guides and magazines, Time Out prides itself on gathering as much information about a place as possible. "We always include plenty of independent, local, smaller businesses," Fiennes said. "They're generally far more interesting than the bigger ones. Also, we're independent ourselves, so we have a natural empathy for the idiosyncratic one-offs."

The guides are created to appeal to all types of visitors. "Our aim has always been to provide the best possible information to the most interesting and significant places," said Fiennes. "These places can be cheap or even free; or they can be expensive. [We want to] help people make choices: Is a place overpriced, or expensive but still good value? Is it cheap but fabulous? Or just cheap? And so on. We judge places by how good they are at providing the service they set out to provide. And if a place has a great reputation, but is in fact overblown and overpriced, we'll say so."

In the crowded market of travel guides, Time Out strives to keep its information fresh by updating its titles every year and featuring information about events in cities around the world on its website, www.timeout.com. The site, which registers more than 1.5 million unique users per month, has formed an affiliate relationship with BookSense.com.

In the U.S., Time Out guides are distributed to the trade through the Transition Vendor created to handle the transition of Publishers Group West clients to Perseus Books Group. --Nomi Schwartz