Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I am another in the no crowd. Can you imagine trying to compare recipes from three CBs, or looking to the beginning of one briefly, to see a recipe that another recipe calls for, or looking to the glossary to see what it has to say about an ingredient you are new with?

As for the bigger bookshelf, I have the plans written up for my third one, and the wood is in the workshop! Probably won't get done until after the holidays, but it's not high on the priority list until then.

Those are all perfect examples of what a high quality cooking app should excel at.

Yeah, I think cookbooks will be going the way of the encyclopedia. I already get annoyed when I have to go get some giant book off the shelf. Even making the grocery list is easier using tech.

Wet blanket time. I'm good at this, really!

So here are the problems with eCookbooks. All of these problems are surmountable, and will be conquered ... but current manufacturers, publishers and distributors are not addressing them or even attempting to address them, and as a result I expect at least a 3 year delay before the vendors get hip to what people actually need in a cookbook.

1. Display Size/Resolution: the iPad barely has enough to legibly display a complex recipe on one screen. Maybe. The other tablets? Forget it, you're scrolling. Flipping pages in a cookbook is annoying enough; scrolling a touchscreen is completely impractical.
2. Market-Trailing: while there is a dedicated technophilic audience for iPad cooking apps, the vast majority of cookbook purchasers, currrently, do not have any computer equpiment which is less than 3 years old and undiscounted. Tablets have to get cheap and common enough to be available used for $50 before the cookbook market is saturated.
3. Applessness: the article champions cool cooking apps with recipe resizing and ingredient searchability. However, the majority of ecookbooks are PDF/Kindle images of print books where the text isn't even selectable. Without extra features, there is no advantage to an ecookbook ... and few publishers are creating extra features, and those on a minority of titles.
4. Price: The least expensive tablet (the new Nook) is $249. Cook-apps are $30 on up. So you're talking an investment of $300 to $700 to get started with ecookbooks. Compare that to getting an overrun cookbook at Half Price for $8.
5. Incentive: currently the print cookbook sector is highly profitable, more so than probably any other sector of the book market. In such an environment, publishers have little incentive to innovate.
6. Fragility: current tablets are easily damaged or ruined in a kitchen environment, and are expensive. Tablets need to get cheaper and tougher (Panasonic has made a start on this)
7. Legacy: someone will need to start buying up electronic rights to old cookbooks and making them ecookbooks. No company I know of has started doing this yet, and it'll take quite a while for the company which does to get the rights they need to a substantial number of cookbooks.
8. Annotations: even the cookbook apps I've seen lack a vital feature -- the ability to make notes on the recipe.

My wife works in the publishing industry. ebooks in general get a lot of media attention because they seem exciting. But today, ebooks account for less than 5% of the total revenue for books sold. That percentage is moving steadily upwards, but slowly.

We are currently in the "early adopter" phase of ecookbooks. Will we all be using them in 15 years? Unquestionably. Will we all be using them next year? Definitely not. The conversion is somewhere in between, and is much further off than breathless news article writers think. This is always the case with new technology.

P.S. The movie ad for The Geometry of Pasta is really fun. Watch it!

I think Fuzzy hits it dead on the head. The current offerings are, indeed, sad direct translations of books, but I really think it will get a lot better but, indeed, it will take a while.

BTW, people are allowed -- nay, encouraged -- to argue with me.

I can't argue too much yet, but will soon. I hope. I am getting a Kindle for my wife and later one for myself, if all goes well. Her's will have a keyboard for making notes. Mine will not, it will be small, simple and cheap. Or cheap-ish anyway. Now does that spell the end of the paper cookbook? No, I doubt it. But just as email has not totally replaced regular mail, it has made a pretty good dent in it.

A simple cookbook in pdf format is readable on most eBook platforms. However some platforms are very proprietary in what they will support. And some platforms are great for the USA but preclude sales of books outside the USA, a potential problem for travelers and/or individuals with more than one country of residence.

The Kindle will support PDF files and sells for 80 to 150 bucks, though the new color display version is up in the 300 dollar range. For an easy to carry format, the kindle far outshines paper. I can carry 1000 cookbooks on a Kindle easier than I can one carry one paper format cookbook. The Kindle is not a impervious to water and so forth, so the paper version shines there, but that is not a quite so serious drawback if you have press and seal or saran wrap some place in your kitchen.

Like email, it will take time and development to really change how we use cookbooks but that is going to happen. What frosts my cookies, so to speak, is Amazon selling their eBooks at slightly less than the new book price, sometime over the new book price. No printing costs, much lighter shipping costs, and yet they still think they need to charge near and sometimes more than a hardcopy goes for. Preposterous. I can get a used copy of many books shipped to the Philippines for less than the cost of the eBook version. Bad business model.

Other than that, I look forward to having fiction, cookbooks, and so forth at my fingertips sometime shortly after Christmas.

I am definitely in the no group....in fact, after swearing off cookbooks, I just bought Ann Burrell's new book "Cook Like a Rock Star". I flipped through it last night and really think I am going to love it...great comments and tips and recipes.
I have a Nook and, while I love reading novels on the Nook, cannot imagine having the same pleasurable experience I had last evening flipping through my new cookbook....having two pages open side by side showing recipe and phot of technique and finished product in one glance is different than flipping back and forth between pages on the Nook.
Ilene

The Nook (and its friends) are the beginnings of the revolution, just the barest necessary to be useful. It is just getting us started and won't (I sure hope) be the end of things.

I see opportunity here (only wish I were smart enough to capitalize on it) - things like Eat Your Books will continue to grow and evolve. I can foresee storing your cookbooks on a home server or "in the cloud" (why do I hate that phrase?) and retrieving it on your tablet, or better yet, that large touchscreen computer above your workspace, recessed into the wall and covered with a tearoff film (like NASCAR uses on their windshields) so dirty fingers aren't a problem. This large touchscreen will of course stream video so you can watch your cooking shows while following along in the kitchen (must DVR them so I can pause to find the ingredients in my fridge because unlike Ray Ray I don't have all the ingredients conveniently portioned on one shelf).

Along with this online database will be advanced search features (I have 1 pound of beef and a rutabaga, what can I make?) scaling tools, comparison features (click on three recipes to compare side-by-side with differences highlighted), fun things like a slot-machine style menu creator (who doesn't love to watch the wheels spinning?), and links to video techniques for certain parts of the recipe (i.e. here's how to double-butterfly the pork loin to stuff and roll). The technology exists; it's just a matter of pulling together the features, designing a decent interface (no mean task) and (probably most importantly) working out the copyright issues. If only I had a spare million or two around to buy the rights to Mastering the Art of French Cooking, etc.

It will be awhile to get there - I estimate about 10 years, when the current crop of kids growing up on tablets will begin to cook for themselves and demand it.

I've given thought to scanning my cookbooks (which will take forever) and making a "rustic" version of this for myself. The interface would be crude, but I could probably cobble something together. Now if I only had some spare time...I nearly cry when I think of how productive I could be without this 3-hour a day commute...

I don't know that I would miss having an actual book. I'm forever spilling things on mine, wearing out the bindings, and in general ruining them. Although I do like leafing through my Alinea cookbook, from which I will probably never make a recipe.