What is your destination city? Which city do you live in? Who is the guide for? When are your travel dates? Where are you staying?

Based on the answers you enter to these five questions, the pages will show travel information about your chosen destinations, scheduled performances and festivals during the time of your stay, information on shopping and lodging, and so forth, in 100-150 pages. If you wish to visit other sites during your trip, you can get five more pages for each destination. Then you can hit the road, bringing with you a personalized travel book, complete with your name on the cover, for US$24.95 (about NT$780).

In September 2007 Dave Sifry, the website's creator, was planning a trip to Dalian, China. Browsing through San Francisco's bookstores, he found that the information in most printed guidebooks was outdated and too meager. Of a 1,200-page China travel guidebook, only two pages were devoted to Dalian, yet he reluctantly bought it, dismayed that couldn't use the other 99% of the information. This gave him the idea of a new way to help his fellow backpackers.

With the explosion of information on the Internet, he thought, why not make good use of it? Still, searching through reams of information can be time consuming. What he wanted was a "living" travel book: that is, one whose content would be updated with changes in itinerary and which would provide useful suggestions and meet individual needs.

With these requirements in mind, offbeatguides.com was born. The website includes information on 30,000 travel destinations around the world, screened by professional and part-time travelers. The content is all released under Creative Commons licenses, so there are no digital copyright problems.

In Taiwan, Tripass, a website operated by Cite Media Holding Group, incorporates information from 300 travel books and hundreds of thousands of images owned by its publishing outlet, Mook, creating a platform serving individuals and travel agents.

Want your book published but can't find a publisher? Need proofreading, editing and cover design? Don't know how to go about marketing your book or applying for an ISBN number?

Newbies and budding authors often find the road toward getting published technically difficult and forbidding. Lulu, a user-friendly self-publishing platform, can help solve this problem.

After thinking up a title, choosing hardcover or paperback, and deciding on size and page count, you can start writing. You can write while sharing your writings with the readers, or you can hide it from them until it's finished.

Lulu can also print a paper book for you. Printing fees are based on page count and book size (the fee for a 32-page paperback is about US$10.90). Lulu will also help market your books: if you want, they can be sold online through Amazon. com and Barnes & Noble at a price determined by you. For each book sold, either paper or electronic editions, Lulu takes a service charge of just 20%, and the remaining income is pocketed by the author.

The sheer creative energy found in the digital world is nothing to be sneezed at. In the US, for instance, over 270,000 titles were published in 2008. But this pales in comparison to the 400,000 published by Lulu, which boasts a membership of 1.3 million.

Lulu was founded in 2002 by the well-known Canadian web entrepreneur Bob Young, who in 1993 founded the open-source software company Red Hat, considered Microsoft's greatest rival. In one stroke, Lulu eliminated all the obstacles in the way of budding authors and changed the face of the publishing industry.

In the wake of Lulu's success, six online acquaintances in China, all fans of chivalric and sci-fi fantasy novels, founded Qidian.com in May 2002. After a rocky start, the firm was bought in October 2004 by online gaming company Shanda Interactive Entertainment, and after four short years and an investment of capital, it became the world's largest Chinese-language literary website for both readers and writers. At present it has over 43 million registered members, with around 930,000 authors completing 3 million original works.

Qidian.com also features a unique payment method. After the subscription rate for a serial novel reaches a certain level, the final third or half of the installments need to be paid for at a rate of about RMB0.04 per 1,000 words. If the whole novel has 300,000 words, the reader will need to pay only RMB4 for the last 100,000-150,000 words. At a 30-70 split between company and author, the author can receive RMB2.80.

Don't take these meager sums lightly. For example, the popular online tomb-raiding adventure novel Gui Chui Deng has over 1.6 million subscribers. The author, Zhang Muye, is a 28-year-old high-school dropout, an otaku who had not been successful in other areas of work. In 2006, he started writing out of boredom, and two years and 2 million words later he had completed eight novels in his Gui Chui Deng series, four of which were published in print by Anhui Literature & Art Publishing House at the end of 2006. There's also a traditional-character edition available in Taiwan through Gobooks.

It's estimated that there are now around 10 authors on Qidian.com whose annual income surpasses RMB1 million, while another 100 or so earn over RMB100,000. Clearly, online writing is easy, but it's hard to make a name for yourself; achieving both fame and wealth is even harder.

To unearth new authors, the Cite Media Holding Group last year launched the Popo website, which currently has around 1500 dedicated authors. But as to who will become the next big star depends on skill and luck. Renowned Taiwanese bloggers Tsai Chih-heng and Wan Wan followed this path to fame.

Some say that for a self-taught online author to succeed is as serendipitous as finding a gold nugget on the beach. But with a simple and handy publishing platform available, it may not be much of a leap for an average Joe to realize his dream of being a writer.