Yes I know long distance trails, but many people like hiking Munros and Hillwalking, and it's a security reason to indicate the most common trail. We try to support sustainable tourism an encouraging people to travel and doing something and not just lying at the beach an drinking. For me it's difficult to understand why there is so little support to hikers in Scotland with putting some waymarks, ant its better to have a GPX trail on the Satnav or Smartphone then getting lost in the fog and rain.
In Wikivoyage, the software supports only JSON which cannot be loaded to any Satnav I know without converting it.
And I do not want to point people to expensive for pay websites, just to find there a track to download, or to use Google, there they usually have only the starting point, and quite often its incorrect.
I bought a whole pile of hiking books in UK, but not everybody has the time and money to order the books in advance for tour planning at home, and that's a security thing you should do, and not arrive, buy a book and start to hike.
I think geographic informations are only data which are not copyright protected as points on a GPX track. The trails are just there and hiked, and the Rother book describes the existing trails, they did not invent these trails. But I would not encourage to share their GPX files (which you are allowed to download if you own the book) but to create the GPX files myself, I'm not paid and I'm not expecting anything for my work. But I consider it a problem, to take data which is publically available and expect someone to pay for it, that's not the idea of open data. I hope you understand, regards Martin