Frommers, the publishers of  the spectaularly successful travel guidebooks series  are now selling their books in Apple’s App Store too.  For now, they have released books about London, Paris, San Francisco, and New York. I suppose more will be coming soon.

This isn’t the first time Frommers is focusing on selling to people who use  Apple products. Their series of audiobooks, on sale for about $7 each, has been available in the iTunes store for quite some time now, and has enjoyed reasonable popularity among iPod users. So it’s hardly a surprise that they are now targeting iPhone and iPod touch users as well.

The trouble is, the apps are at present a bit of a letdown. The information is mostly there, though you don’t get as much content as the books themselves.  And on a device that has Safari, Google maps, as well as GPS AND 3G, any travel-related app needs to offer something that either does better than this combination or uses the these built-in features to offer much more than content scanned from a book. These apps do neither. Basic search features, but no location awareness, for example.

And there are some bugs. Not every time, but the apps crash often enough to annoy you. I know this sort of thing can be fixed easily, but until it is, this problem is a big concern.

The Frommers people haven’t actually developed this app on their own; they made some arrangement with Modality, (yes, the guys who made the medical educational software and demoed at the WWDC in July).  It’s time Modality figured out what’s going wrong here. 

In case you’re wondering, the apps offer the standard (but very useful) fare: restaurant searches by category, hotels, itinerary recommendations, shopping, the works. 

All the apps cost $9.99, which is just a bit steep, although less expensive than the actual books.

Do I recommend it? Look at it this way: if you’re traveling to Paris, and have the option of carrying either the rather bulky Frommers book or this little app on your iPhone, I’d say you’re better off traveling light.