I am an in throes of planning a trip to India in winter. On my way back to the US, I will be transiting through parts of Cambodia and Vietnam. Since, I had only superficially studied the history of South East Asia in high school, I picked up a paper copy of "The Indochina Chronicles" to deepen my understanding of the region prior to my visit. This book, first published in 2005, was a good and useful read but it also left me unsatisfied. I was certain that I had not fully grasped many of the pages from the book.
The Indochina Chronicles suffered from three notable limitations. First, it had no maps. Having limited knowledge of the region's geography and preferring to read the paperback book without an atlas or a computer at hand, I had only a foggy idea of the author's route. Second, the author used terms such as "sawngthaew", "cyclo", "xe om", "tuk tuk" and "pirogue" that were unfamiliar to me. From the context of their use, it was clear that these were all some form of transportation. But a picture of each of these would have imparted a lot more meaning. Finally, the author, who has traveled through the area over multiple years, sprinkled his adventures from the different years in the same prose. It was not always clear if his impressions in a particular paragraph were from a trip during the Vietnam-war era, the 90s or the 2000s.
All three of the problems above can be fixed in a paper version of the book with simple maps, more pictures and better sign-posting of the text. Even so, I couldn't help but think that the book would have been more useful to a traveler had it been written for the web - with Google/Yahoo interactive maps, Flickr pictures and history callouts from Wikipedia. Perhaps such a book could even be optimized for eBook readers such as the Kindle, Nook and the iPad. Obviously writing a book in this style is a substantially different exercise from writing a traditional book. I suspect that were the effort to be made, travelers to Indochina would have a magnificent resource to prepare for their trip.
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