Comparing and contrasting the Lonely Planet Discovery Series to the Classic Country Guide edition I would be hard pressed to recommend the Discovery series even if it was half the price - which it should be. If you cut the number of pages, use larger type and add lots of photos you can guess that it is the actual words which get eliminated. Although the page count is trimmed by 60% I would say the content is trimmed by about 75%. Paris suffers less, but places like Colmar only get 2 sentences versus several pages. Across the board, instead of getting 6 or 7 restaurant recommendations for an area, you get 1 or 2. To be clear, the photos are no 'DK Eyewitness' level you could probably get bigger photos from brochures.
What's Different with the Discovery Edition vs. the Classic edition
- Far less written content
- Less eating, drinking and sleeping suggestions
- Elimination of smaller cities
- Larger type, probably 12 point vs. 8 point in classic
- 408 pages vs. 1012 pages
- Heavier paper (so its probably 3/4 the weight of the 1012p edition)
- Less maps, but they are in color
- Same number of 'best of suggestions'
- Generally the same number of itinerary suggestions
- A few full page color photos
- Lots of small inline color pictures which are so small they aren't terribly valuable.
I highly recommend against the Discovery guide and recommend using the classic country guide for the same price. If you only plan on going to a few areas, it's easy enough to crack the binding and staple together segments you need to save weight and still get very detailed information on the places you want to visit.