“Parachute Artists” or “Tourists With Typewriters”: Creative and Cocreative Labor in Travel Guidebook Production

The aim of this article is to reexamine the processes of cultural production and consumption as reconfigured at the intersection of the print and digital eras. The article attempts to understand the complex interplay between audiences, labor relations, changing authorship patterns, technological shifts, and genre specificity in travel guide(book) publishing as a model and a particular case of digitization in creative/cultural/media industries. On the basis of qualitative research, it combines political economy with cultural and media studies and genre analysis with cultural economics. The goal is to grasp the implications and paradoxes of the convergence between the creative labor of professional travel writers and the cocreative labor of users-cum-aspiring-writers as taking place within a specific, locally and historically situated, genre culture.