Hi John

I think there would be potential for such a book. It's success would depend on
how it met prospective readers expectations, for me that would be filling a gap
that wasn't covered. Cycle climbing has been a theme of many recent books,
there's a French book on classic TdF climbs with plenty of photos, a US book by
Owen Mulholland with narrative on TdF climbers (he includes van Looy, Hinault,
Indurain ...), Matt Rendell's book on the history of Columbian climbers, and
lots more. For me those that rework old information and hope to capitalise on
the title "Climbing ..." aren't very successful.

Europe has many technical books listing climbs - there's a Belgium book listing
all climbs in Belgium (Mur de Huy is 73rd I think), the Altigraph series.
IThere's a Cent Cols book listing climbs in France. But there's the view that
WWW is a better medium for providing such info - for instance it should be
possible to hypertext or hotspot techniques to drill-down or present alternative
views (contours, photographs..) of a mountain or do intelligent searches across
database.

I think KoM is the experts forum on climbing and I like to hear of climbs in US
or Europe and peoples experience of them, so am happy with current forum. It
just needs more input frpm us. Moving to any other host forum immediately has a
high drop-out rate. There aren't so many successful international forums such
as KoM. The naional forums which Nigel mentioned have very high participation
rates. Eurobike is fine by me but they'd be a drop-out rate.

Mike

John Summerson <jsummers@...> wrote:
On that note, I was approached to consider putting together a book about
road bike climbing, including listing the top US climbs in some fashion,
and was wondering if the interest level was out there. Anyone think
that information would be useful?


Mike Fletcher

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