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Paper map sales are booming

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Re: Paper map sales are booming

#41

Post by romwell »

joshstrange wrote: post #2

> His customers, he added, aren’t just looking to maps for directions, but as inspiration for future trips or even as art worth hanging. I think that alone accounts for the vast majority of this increase. The article throws that in as a minor detail but I'd bet money it's the only reason. Of course you don't get as many clicks for "More people are buying maps as art". 2 of the 3 examples of maps they give at the end…

>The article throws that in as a minor detail but I'd bet money it's the only reason.

For most people, perhaps.

After working in Google Geo, I drove across the country and back (CA - NC - TX - CA) using the trusty Rand & McNally atlas and compass, and couldn't have been happier.

No nagging voices telling me where to go. No countdown timers making me wary of taking a scenic detour. No feeling of going on rails.

Yes to seeing things and being aware of my environment. Yes to understanding where I am at all times. Yes to exercising my brain and being in control of my lived experience.

Yes to not becoming stupid [1][2][3][4].

But sure, maps are pretty too.

[1] https://www.vocativ.com/418342/google-maps-gps-navigation/in...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5179471&page=1

[3] https://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/a-sportsmans-life/gps-i...

[4] https://www.thedrive.com/news/8686/study-using-gps-navigatio...

Re: Paper map sales are booming

#42

Post by jcranmer »

purpleflame1257 wrote: post #13
ghaff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair. As someone who grew up with physical maps, using them is pretty intuitive but I can see how it wouldn't be for everyone. And, of course, some aspects of topographic maps take some education. With respect to compass, I'm not sure how critical real orienteering is for most people. It's more about not being totally turned around and/or being able to make sure you hit some feature like a road.

Just being able to know which way is "north" is probably sufficient.

There's a difference between geographic north and magnetic north that can get pretty significant (if you live in NE US, magnetic north about 10-20° west of north). If you're sailing the clipper route, for part of your journey, your magnetic compass now points as far as northwest rather than north.

Re: Paper map sales are booming

#43

Post by kzrdude »

rr888 wrote: post #4

Went hiking while relying on a phone app. Offline, it cached the map no problems, until a few hours in when the TTL must have been triggered then everything disappeared. Bought a real map soon after.

OsmAnd is very good. You download maps for it. And OSM data in general is a great deal better at hiking trails than google maps.

And it's good/useful to know that you can always try to use GPS even in airplane mode. Just GPS is recieve-only so it's passive (but the location service uses multiple sources of information apart from just GPS or GPS-like if it can.)

Re: Paper map sales are booming

#44

Post by bee_rider »

eldaisfish wrote: post #28
kypro wrote: post #20

Something I find really fun when traveling in the car with kids is to give them a paper map and ask them to plan a route a for us to get to our destination. Then when you're driving ask them to follow along and give the directions. Obviously they can't be too young and they're not going to be perfect, but if you have a child around 7-13 they'll probably find this quite fun. Being able to use a map is one of those ski…

an interesting thought experiment is to ponder just how many skills are being lost due to technology. I know how to read a map and how to find rough compass bearings but i was never in a situation where i needed either skill. Could i manage without GPS - probably but i’m not confident. If GPS died tomorrow because of a solar flare, would the younger generations manage?

I think people could re-learn they skill pretty quickly, but putting that aside, I wonder how well we could do with just ground based stuff. We’d still have triangulation via cell towers, which was widely used not that long ago. Also I wonder how well we could do with a modern cellphone using image recognition on the road signs paired with a really accurate map of the roads.

Re: Paper map sales are booming

#45

Post by kimbernator »

This is a little tangential, but last year me and my girlfriend went to Greece for the first time. A few days after we purchased the tickets, a book came in the mail. She had ordered a tourism guide for Greece that had some recommendations about what to see, where to eat, where to stay, etc.

My first reaction was along the lines of "why would we do this when we have the entire internet? Each section is written by only one person recommending what they liked, how can I rely on that?"

Well, it turns out that avoiding the chaotic whirlwind of dubiously-funded and low-quality clickbait articles that come up on google when you search "things to do in _____" makes the planning process much easier. Even if the book missed a few places we would have enjoyed, it was a pleasure to read this person's insight on the areas we were in and the places they thought were worth seeing. It came with useful maps of every location we were in and gave fairly accurate pricing estimates for each activity.

The simplicity of seeing a couple sentences about why you should take the time to see a historic site or scenic view, or eat at some little hole in the wall restaurant and taking them at face value makes the entire travel process so much easier and more fun. Googling around and seeing conversations about what to do on Reddit will make me second-guess every choice and wonder if I'm truly maximizing my trip, which is guaranteed to make the trip worse, regardless of what I end up seeing.

Consuming data and services from the internet has become very transactional: Every article about tourism is either selling a ton of ad space or is sponsoring the recommendations, both of which make it more annoying to get data that way. It's hard to tell what the writer's financial motivations are. The same is true for google maps: some things are promoted because they paid for it, not because they are better. Books, paper maps, and other "analog" formats are written by people that want to sell the book. It's not impossible that they are getting kickbacks for their recommendations, but in this age where informational books are gasping for air, they really do need to do a good job for people to keep buying them.

edit: I might as well plug the guide we used - as of this comment it's the newest version but it looks like there will be a new one in 06/23: https://www.amazon.com/Lonely-Planet-Greece-Travel-Guide/dp/...

Re: Paper map sales are booming

#47

Post by AnimalMuppet »

082349872349872 wrote: post #22
ghaff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair. As someone who grew up with physical maps, using them is pretty intuitive but I can see how it wouldn't be for everyone. And, of course, some aspects of topographic maps take some education. With respect to compass, I'm not sure how critical real orienteering is for most people. It's more about not being totally turned around and/or being able to make sure you hit some feature like a road.

While you're attempting to generally go downstream (think about it), even if you wind up totally turned around, then at least never leave your drainage.

Yup. I didn't know where I was, but knew what drainage I was in, and knew that my car was at the upper end of pavement at the main stream in the drainage. I went downhill until I hit the main stream. Oh, the road is paved? Follow that up to the car. No sweat, even though I really didn't know where I was. Just knowing I was within the drainage was all I needed.

Re: Paper map sales are booming

#48

Post by kwhitefoot »

kzrdude wrote: post #43
rr888 wrote: post #4

Went hiking while relying on a phone app. Offline, it cached the map no problems, until a few hours in when the TTL must have been triggered then everything disappeared. Bought a real map soon after.

OsmAnd is very good. You download maps for it. And OSM data in general is a great deal better at hiking trails than google maps. And it's good/useful to know that you can always try to use GPS even in airplane mode. Just GPS is recieve-only so it's passive (but the location service uses multiple sources of information apart from just GPS or GPS-like if it can.)

And Osmand does walking routes while offline which Google Maps does not.

Re: Paper map sales are booming

#49

Post by dljsjr »

Anybody remember Triptiks from AAA? You'd go to a AAA office or call them on the phone, tell them where you were going, and in return you'd get a printed spiral top-bound pad with your trip broken down in to multiple legs, the roads/routes pre-highlighted, gas stops and prices estimated in, a list of sites for stopping off at, etc. All human curated and human annotated (the roads on your route were literally gone over by a person with a Highlighter). I'm sure it was all pulled from some sort of centralized/normalized/standardized data source but the human touch was definitely there.

They were awesome. When we were growing up most big family trips were in the car because gas and hotels were just so much more affordable than flying an entire family anywhere. I got to be the "navigator" on so many trips by helping family members read the Triptiks.

Apparently AAA still offers these, but they're generated digitally now via their app, and you can print them off if you want. But something about those human-built Triptiks were really really special.

Re: Paper map sales are booming

#50

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ufmace wrote: post #18
rob74 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange... if you store a map for offline viewing in Google Maps, it will be cached for at least a few months - and when that time expires, it will ask you if you want to update it. But I can't vouch for the various hiking apps which may be better for hiking data, but have worse UX overall. Or you can use an "offline-only" app like OSMAnd and feed it with GPX tracks downloaded from hiking sites, then you only have to…

Well that's just it - it's probably supposed to do that. But bugs happen, and a phone could die or break for any number of reasons outside of your control. People on the internet trying to explain why some particular failure that you saw shouldn't happen won't be there when you're stuck with no way to navigate, and their arguments won't be of any use. Paper maps are actually immune to most of these failure modes.

Non-laminated paper maps may not survive immersion all that well. On the other hand, your phone may not survive that, either...
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