What company makes the best travel book/guides?

Europe - Rick Steves

Everywhere else - Lonely Planet

ETA: You may want to wait on Italy as he likely has a 2018 book coming out in the next month or so.

You're reading it at this very moment

I was more thinking of it to read for the trip planning

Not nessiarrliy to big there

I usually skip the book and browse the Google.

I find the Rick Steves books (including the one on Italy) to be more readable and less encyclopedic than the others. I also like the Michelin Green Guides. I don't need the ones that go on for pages and pages reviewing hotels. Fodor's and Frommer's are good but you can get it all for free on their web sites.

Rick Steve's book cross-referenced with Tripadvisor reviews. That's what I usually do anyway. It really helps me decide sometimes.

National Geographic
Eyewitness travel

I find the quality of Rick Steves’ advice/books varies, depending on the destination. He’s great on Italy, esp the tricks/tips that help you navigate hugely crowded attractions and get the most out of limited time. But he was utter rubbish on my recent trip to Normandy. I downloaded his Normandy/D-Day book & attempted to use it to go to some spread-out sites in the countryside. I repeatedly found that the listed directions were either too vague to be useful (ie, “10 minutes east of Town X”, with no road numbers or actual Km distances) or completely wrong (giving the wrong road number for a site’s location). So buyer beware, and maybe browse the books a bit before buying.

Ditto for Lonely Planet: depending on the year & location, the guides can be quite good or written by a barely literate 19 year old. My favorite howler from a Lonely Planet guide, on some town in Tuscany (I forget which one, Orvieto, maybe): It looks like a bucket of Etruscan hill town, running down the valley. LOLOL.

Some of the best info, esp on food, is found on ex-pat blogger websites. (Ex-pat simply because they’re the ones writing in English.)