In reply to Andy Gamisou:
We have been dealing with this question for a long time, in fact, I remember one of the first things we created in the early days of the UKClimbing site was a topo image of Malham with route lines you could click on to display the route info. This was in around 1997!
My conclusion after all this time is that you are actually talking about different things here, it isn’t an either/or. An app on a mobile device is still finding its place in climbing but we have seen a big take-up in usage for our app in the last year. My prediction is that a majority of people will be using an app to find their routes when at the crag within five years. This doesn’t mean the end of books, and I suspect many people will still use a combination of both but, as a method of finding routes, expect to see more and more people staring at phones when at crags.
One knock-on from the increase in Rockfax app take-up has been that users expect it to cover everything. We have received emails from people asking why a certain crag isn't covered in areas where we have never produced a print book. The best was someone asking for the entire Frankenjura! Everything available, all the time is what people expect nowadays.
So handheld mobile coverage is the future in terms of people using climbing information at crags. Interactive web-based coverage is different but also important. Our aim is to also have the Rockfax app information available via a web interface sometime in the future although this is a while away for sure. This is because big screens are still the best way to view topos when planning climbs and searching for crags. In effect, this is the inspiration section that is often said to be missing from the phone-sized app coverage. A book manages to do both which is a significant plus point and the reason that I expect printed guidebooks have a bright future as well.
The problem with mobile system is that they are incredibly hard and expensive to produce so your only real choice is to piggy-back on someone else's system. This reduces your control but can vastly increase your audience.
A web-based system is significantly easier especially if you combine it with some PDFs. In this case, it is not really even web-based, it is actually just digital print. This is fine but doesn’t move us forward particularly and is impossible to monetise although this may not be a priority for you. An interactive web-based system is significantly more work and probably a waste of time if you aren’t also doing a mobile one, or making your web-based system easy to print out, in which case you might as well just use PDFs.
Alan