The article certainly puts you in great company - congrats!

Aside from those 5 main points, I'd add several more. Here's one: they discourage the pursuit of knowledge. If the guidebook tells us all we need to know about a site of historical significance ... then why not stay in the hotel and read all about it, rather than hear the words of locals or the site's tour guide?

Everything Pelton says is true but you'll still need to buy a guidebook unless you want to avoid wasting a lot of time and money on the road while missing out on quite a few interesting things.

Pelton suggests using Google to collect information. Yes, but most of the free information on the internet is one-sided advertising or the work of enthusiastic amateurs. Sure, the amateurs can provide some excellent tips, but they won't have explored the whole range of travel possibilities, such as checking every hotel, restaurant, bus station, nightsclub, etc, in a place. They'll be a world class expert on the hotel where they happened to stay, but that's it.

Much of the information on the internet is outdated or incorrect, and the enthusiastic amateurs who create hobby websites have no incentive to update it. After all, who is paying them to do so?

Also, personal tastes vary a lot and a professional travel writer is more likely to try to cater to a wide audience than a newly returned traveler who wants to tell the world about HIS or HER trip.

I visit the travel forums often to glean fresh facts, but I'd never try to plan a trip to a strange place based only on what I read there. If I'm going to Disneyland or Acapulco, sure, who needs a guide? But try going somewhere like Ethiopia or Fiji with no independent information. It will cost you a lot more than the cost of a guidebook, I guarantee.

The average travel guide costs US$20. The average trip to another continent costs US$2000 and up. Only a fool would jeopardize the success of their trip trying to save one percent of the cost.

Pelton points out that travel guides create travelers trails swamped by herds of backpackers or whatever. So true, especially when everyone has the same guidebook (i.e. Lonely Planet).

But a really good guidebook will cover an entire destination, not just the hot spots you'll find in the likes of Frommers. In my new guide to Fiji I have 16 pages on the Yasawa Islands where 90 percent of Fiji backpackers now go, but the whole book is 356 pages long. It's not that hard to get of the beaten track and have a South Pacific paradise all to yourself. Most backpackers are just too lazy and unadventurous to do so.

Thanks for your perspectives. I might add this, straight from the pages of Vagabonding:

"Guidebooks should never be your only source of travel information, of course, but they deserve a special mention because they’re likely the only resource you’ll bring with you on the road. They also contain the kind of pertinent, specialized information that can help even the most timid homebody gain knowledge and courage about the practical possibilities of vagabonding. Nevertheless, you should carefully consider a guidebook’s advantages and limitations before you use it to dictate your travels.

"Too often, travelers adhere far too religiously to the advice and information that guidebooks dispense. And, while some critics blame this trend on the current popularity of 'independent' travel guidebooks, this certainly isn’t a recent phenomenon. When visiting the Holy Land in the 19th century, Mark Twain expressed frequent exasperation at the guidebook fundamentalists in his travel party: 'I can almost tell, in set phrase, what they will say when they see Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho, and Jerusalem,' Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad, 'because I have the books they will 'smouch' their ideas from. These authors write pictures and frame rhapsodies, and lesser men follow and see with the author’s eyes instead of their own, and speak with his tongue… The pilgrims will tell of Palestine, when they get home, not as it appeared to them, but as it appeared in [the guidebooks] – with the tints varied to suit each pilgrim's creed.'

"Because a guidebook can thus jade your impressions, it’s important to use it as a handy reference during your adventures – not as an all-encompassing holy book. Even professional guidebook writers recommend you maintain a healthy independence from their advice. 'We remind people that a Lonely Planet book is not a bible,' travel publisher Tony Wheeler once told me in an interview. 'Just because we don’t recommend this or that restaurant doesn’t mean it isn’t any good. We encourage travelers to try something different. We’ve even had people write to say they use our books only to see where not to go. They don’t want to stay with everybody else, so they cross the hotels we recommend off their lists and go to other ones. I think that’s great'."

While I'm at it, here another take, from Taras Grescoe's The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists:

"Frankly, I've dropped my guidebook many times, and what usually happens is: 1) I walk the wrong way and spend an enriching afternoon exploring some industrial suburb; 2) I take the metro to the gallery and find it's closed on Tuesdays; or 3) I cave in to hunger and have a bad pizza in a fast-food joint and discover, when I pick up the guide again, that I could have lunched on splendid gnocchi with pesto in a bargain trattoria down a nearby sidestreet."

...So I think the point in all this guidebook advice is to use your guidebook in moderation, and to know where its usefulness begins and ends.