( PROVIDED PHOTO )

When Bob D'Antonio started writing guidebooks in the early 1990s, his methods were low-tech: sketch trail maps by hand, take a photo of a cliff, trace it, draw in the routes.

Oh, and send it all back and forth to publishers by snail mail.

But now, for guidebooks like his latest -- "Boulder Canyon Rock Climbs" -- D'Antonio uses PhotoShop and a GPS.

"You do layers, you draw the lines in, and they're there," he said.

D'Antonio's book, put out by Wolverine Publishing in Silt, is one of several shiny new guidebooks that came on the market this year for Boulder climbing areas.

The guidebooks many climbers were using before, such as Richard Rossiter's Falcon guides for the Flatirons, Boulder Canyon and Eldorado Canyon, are 9 or more years old and, while good, lack the luster of glossy pages, color photos and contour-lined maps of the crags.

"The standards, I think, are higher," D'Antonio said. "I think it's this new generation of computer-savvy people, the expectations are much higher."

Fred Knapp, president of Boulder's Sharp End Publishing -- which, he said, made the first color guidebook in America -- said color photos don't necessarily make a guidebook good, but information does.

"The Eldorado Canyon book that just came out ('Eldorado Canyon: A Climbing Guide'), I think is the new gold standard," Knapp said.

Sharp End published the book, which weighs in at 448 pages.

"He (author Steve Levin) met with so many early climbers, these guys who are in their 70s now, and he just spent years getting the right pictures in the right light so you wouldn't get shadows," Knapp said. "There's an emphasis to detail I've never seen before."

Good reviews

Matt Samet, editor of Climbing magazine, said by e-mail that the new crop of books -- Levin's book, D'Antonio's book and Jason Haas's guide, "Climbing Boulder's Flatirons," also published by Sharp End -- are all excellent.

Check it

For more information on "Boulder Canyon Rock Climbs," "Eldorado Canyon: A Climbing Guide" and "Climbing Boulder's Flatirons," visit wolverinepublishing.com and sharpendbooks.com.

"For each of these areas, these are the first full-color photo-topo guides that I've seen, and having a photographic reference to the walls, versus hand-drawn topos, goes a long way in locating climbs and matching text descriptions to the routes," Samet said.

The action shots by professional photographers and historical essays by major figures at each area are an additional draw for the new books, Samet said.

"To me, the test of a good guidebook is, will you come away with a love, a passion, a desire to preserve what you have experienced?" Knapp said. "And that has to be in conjunction with getting good, accurate info."

More expensive

The new guidebooks cost more. The new Boulder Canyon book is $35; the Falcon guide is $20. But D'Antonio said writing guidebooks is still a labor of love with a minimal monetary return.

"They're not expensive compared to what you get," D'Antonio said. "You're getting something that lasts a long time."

The book came out on Aug. 12; D'Antonio said he had sold 1,100 copies as of the end of October.

"You can print some stuff off the Internet, or you can get 1,600 climbs."

Knapp calls the Eldorado Canyon guidebook a steal at $40, saying color computer books are more than $50.

D'Antonio said it's not just the glossy paper -- the new books are sturdy, and in his book's case, the new book includes many more climbs.

"In Boulder Canyon, there's probably 600 to 700 new routes since the old guidebook," he said. "The activity is amazing."