A screenshot of an electronic guide to Sanya, Hainan province.

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Printed guides from professional writers and editors might have been the go-to choice for tourists in the past, but crowdsourced electronic guides, powered by the imagination of thousands of avid travelers, are changing all that.

Different from traditional guidebooks, the e-books are compiled and updated based on tons of information shared by individual travelers online. They can be downloaded onto tablets and cellphones, and most are free.

Mafengwo.cn, a popular Chinese crowdsourced website, reports that its travel guides were downloaded more than 220 million times.

Most of the content is user-generated, such as pictures, travelogues and comments, from which valuable information is identified through data mining and semantic analysis, says Chen Gang, the co-founder of Mafengwo. "We have a set of algorithms to select what will be put into our travel guides."

The website started as a humble forum, where backpackers and travel buffs shared their experiences. Chen and his friend Lyu Gang, both frequent travelers, founded it in 2006.

"We found that the printed guidebooks were not updated, while travel information online is scattered and unsystematic," says Chen. "So we wanted to build a place where travelers could share their information firsthand."

In the first four years, the forum got more and more people to chip in with their travelogues, reviews of tourist attractions and personal stories of their journeys.