Sometimes the best travel book for me has not been the product of a big travel publisher. For example, on my first trip to Japan in the late 1980s, Japan Solo saved me a lot of time. It had far more maps than any other guidebook I've seen. Some of the maps showed individual establishments on a particular block. Since I was traveling pre-World Wide Web, that book was exactly what I needed in Japan! An Amazon search will often show whether there is a good guidebook for a destination that is not from a big travel publisher.

If I have to choose a guidebook from one of the big travel publishers, I never automatically buy the LP or Moon or Rough Guide. I go to the library or the brick-and-mortar bookstore and look through the index of each candidate to see which books ignore or give short shrift to particular things I am interested in for that particular trip, and which cover them more fully. This takes just a few minutes, and, although it's not foolproof, it at least gives me a shot at getting something that will be useful rather than dead weight in my luggage. If it's a coin-flip decision, I may pick the one that was updated most recently.

Once I used a Rick Steves book to find a place to stay, then I returned it to the library before I departed.