Motoko Rich on an initiative to use online recipes as a marketing tool for selling books:
Most people who want to cook at home eventually look up a recipe online. According to comScore, an Internet marketing research company, food sites attracted 45.6 million unique visitors in September, up 10 percent from a year ago, more than double the rate of total Internet growth in the United States. At the same time, the Internet is shaking up the publishing industry, as authors in all genres debate whether giving away content generates or diminishes sales. In some respects cookbooks would seem particularly vulnerable, because recipes are self-contained in a way that a chapter of a novel is not.
Oddly, the thought of recipe e-books has never occurred to people. It makes sense…Who wouldn’t want to thumb through a Mobipocket recipe book on their PDA or cellphone while at the supermarket?
Fun fact about recipes and copyright: the instructions of a recipe cannot be copyrighted, although the words and phrasing inside the recipe can be (i.e., you can steal any recipe from anywhere as long as you change the wording a bit).
Of course, as anyone who has played with MealMaster software can attest, merely having 140,000 recipes at your finger tips does not necessarily make you a better cook. For one thing, how do you choose a recipe?
If you want to search by a certain ingredient, recipe sites give you some search capability. But do we discover recipes by deciding on an ingredient we wish to use?
If you want to search visually, you could look through flickr recipes for something that is a feast for the eyes.
Should we rely on community tastes? Is this a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth (to use a tired and stale metaphor) or allowing the cream to rise to the top? Who really trusts the effusive rating of a kim chi recipe by some anonymous geek from Estonia or Liberia?
Wikibooks seems to have a cookbook project going, although I would remain a little skeptical. I have to wonder whether this soup recipe which called for two tablespoons of rat poison was legitimate or just the result of a wiki-vandalizer.
Public domain ebooks do not seem to be useful, nor do recipes by famous writers (see Young Tom Hudson’s Leeks) .
Should we seek out the opinions of a food blogger for a personal perspective? But who knows if bloggers really have prepared the dishes they blogged about or are they just faking it? Also, although an RSS feed for a food blog offers the allure of portability, how do you save the recipe for future reference? (I’ve noticed by the way that there are a lot more vegetarian blogs than blogs for other food types, and also this excellent reference).
For me, I inevitably bookmark websites and blog threads about favorite recipes, paste them onto my PDA and promptly forget to read it again. Recipezaar, for example, has an excellent community, but it is so arduous to have to wade through a hundred variations for shrimp creole that I give up. (Also, I don’t like the ads and the slow loading of each page).
This raises a fundamental question about the acquisition of taste (both culinary and literary). Is this something where it’s wise to trust the wisdom of the crowds or you should take the time to make your own discoveries (either on or your own or at a neighbor’s house).
More importantly, the rise of wireless devices and ebooks means that more people will be carrying an encyclopedia of recipes in their pocket. (The biggest source of recipes could be in your delicious links). It also means that people will start to make cooking decisions once inside the supermarket. More spontaneity! As someone who regularly lugs giant cookbooks to and from the supermarket, I appreciate not having to decide which cookbook to bring to the store before I leave my house. On the other hand, cookbooks are bulky creatures and not meant to be toted around. They are bulky precisely for the purpose of staying on the kitchen counter while you scurry around the kitchen. In this respect, low-energy devices like e-ink readers can be useful not only at the supermarket but also in the meal preparation stage. They don’t switch into energy-saving mode after 2 minutes of activity, and a sponge could easily wipe away ketchup stains.
But wouldn’t it be nice to put a note in the margin to double the amount of cumin?
I absolutely have cooked every recipe on my blog! And thanks for the shoutout. I have both a blog and a site because of the issues you mentioned, so the site is more “organized” and browsable. Most of the recipes and ideas in the ebooks are on the site, however they’re more contained and organized sort of offering a “one stop” shopping experience rather than collecting your own together. I can’t imagine carrying a cookbook to a store though…