The death of the climbing guide?

Well it seems like it's happened. A iphone app has been developed for use in the quarries, therefore meaning that all of those with a iphone can now download said app and use it instead of a guidebook. I feel sad as although it might be a little old fashioned I like owning a guidebook to an area.

At uni my friends would be a little surprised when we'd be discussing route idea for the day and they'd say something like "whats that classic VS down the Nant Gwynant Vally?" and I'd pipe up with "you mean Bovine right? or Oxo, or oxine?". I like to read guidebooks. Apart from being stuff full ot routes they usually have a history section or a local geology section (or even local plantlife etc). I found that they are usually really awesome to read. Take something like the Cloggy Guide. It's a small guide which contains all the winter and summer lines on cloggy. Now apart from being a very well set out guidebook and very neat, it has a history section like no other. I'll appreciate that Cloggy lends itself to a good history section (what with so many stories surrounding the cliff like the Indian Face Saga etc) but the point is that they didn't have include this rich history that adds to the cliff.

I think that maybe books appeal to a certain type of climber. I value the time spent in the pub reading up when a route was first put up, who the first ascentionist was and all the little tit-bits that get included with decent guides (like why they named the route as they did, see the old '92 slate guide for examples of this). It's nice to see who did what and at what time the route was put up. For example Bengal Buttress was climbed in 1930, and it's still a hard route today, but at the time it must have been a massive achievement! This kind of stuff is put in guidebooks.

I know quite a few climbers who wouldn't dream of reading thier climbing guide. People who'll use it as a guide to get them to a crag and then up a route (infact I know a few climbers who use them to get them to a crag, but don't fully read the route descriptions!). They'll treat it as a guide rather than the wealth of information and this saddens me.

So is this the way it's going? Am I going to be an old climber, sporting a patchy beard and still climbing with traditional protection (scorning the bolts that adorn my beloved cliffs) and thumbing through a tatterned up well cherised stack of bound paper while young hip cool climbers pause on thier belay ledges to check the route on thier iphones and update thier facebook statuses about who the last pitch was. I hope this doesn't happen...