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I'm actually surprised that printed cookbooks are still economically viable using any kind of publishing model. They remind me of those books from the 1980s fi

I'm actually surprised that printed cookbooks are still economically viable using any kind of publishing model. They remind me of those books from the 1980s filled with printed copies of the source code for computer programs. You would input the text from the book using your keyboard, and compile/interpret the program. That was how many programs were distributed, because a printed book on a truck had higher bandwidth than any other readily-available channel. And then there were also books about learning to write your own programs that may also have included some source code. I think that cookbooks filled with recipes are like the former, and books about learning to make your own recipes are like the latter. Those recipe books simply became obsolete with ubiquitous Internet access. Countless recipes are open source and freely available. Barely anything in a recipe book is eligible for copyright protection. You can basically rewrite instructions in your own words and make your own drawings or photographs, if any, and that boxed spaghetti with canned marinara recipe is now printable as part of your own cookbook. So it is very smart to--as with the book in the article--load up all your recipes with copyright-protected photographs, rather than leaving them out to cut print costs. But even so, that book as described seemed more about trademarks and brands than content. It might be useful for franchisees or for professional imitators. When I am cooking at home, I rarely even refer to a recipe, and when I do, it is just one of the thousands of results from an Internet search. Does anyone here still bother buying cookbooks? Would it not be more useful to simply learn how to cook without referring to recipes? Who needs that level of restaurant-style uniformity and consistency in their own kitchen?

mcphage 10y ago
> Those recipe books simply became obsolete with ubiquitous Internet access. Countless recipes are open source and freely available. These two sentences contradict each other. You are correct: countless recipes are open source and freely available. However, that leads to the same problem with anything else that's freely available online—quality wildly varies. Without some strict curation of what's available, the expected value of a random recipe you find online is often too low to be worth spending the time and ingredients making. Thus recipe books keep their value—if the book is well reviewed, you can have enough confidence in the recipes it contains to be worth the money and effort to make.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  But I don't have any more confidence in reviews than I have in the judgment and reputation of traditional book publishers. All those curation arguments boil down to trademarks and branding. If you don't know enough to judge for yourself, you still have to know enough to judge whether the judge you delegate knows enough to judge for you. Maybe you delegate to Alton Brown because he is on television and you like how he explains things. You're choosing to trust Alton Brown to only put his trademark on things that Alton Brown approves of. But why do you trust Alton Brown? You trust the Food Network to choose celebrity television personality trademarks, perhaps? But their goal is to entice you to buy trademark-branded things from Food Network and their advertisers. Their hosts are hired to make good television shows, not necessarily good demonstrations or recipes. They hired Guy Fieri, too, you know! Based strictly on screen time, he seems better at describing what he is eating than actually cooking anything. If you don't know anything about cooking, you have to trust someone to tell you what to do. How do you know you can trust those reviewers? A lot of them are just food snobs parroting what they learned from previous generations of food snobs. The key precept is that when you are the one doing the choosing, it's less likely that someone is picking you, as their mark, and forcing you into making an illusory choice that always benefits them, no matter what you pick. The argument against curation is that the pool of potential curators is just as deep and variable in quality as the things they curate. So you need a curator for your curators--a reviewer for your reviewers. And then you need a meta-meta-curator to judge the quality of your meta-curators, and it's just tortoises all the way down. I'd prefer to do an objective analysis. Pick a set of recipes for the same dish, make all of them, have an accomplice label each with a letter--so you don't know which is which--and do a blind taste test. Rank the lettered portions according to your own preference, and then your accomplice will let you know which recipe you chose as the best. The same process can inform you as to what brand of tomatoes is best in your homemade pasta sauce, or whether unbroken-grain wild rice is really worth the price premium over the bits and pieces, or which tortillas are best for burrito night, or which beer brand is best for general drinking. Trust the objective measurements. A little bit of science in your kitchen obviates all need for unearned reputation and trust in trademarks. And that makes you a reliable curator for your friends and family, because your meta-curator is the unimpeachable wisdom of objective science!
madcaptenor 10y ago
Basically, you're paying for curation. I buy cookbooks because I'd rather have one recipe that I have some faith will be good than ten recipes that might sort of work. Having a pile of maybe-good recipes is like having a bunch of StackOverflow answers to things that are sort of related to my problem. I also still buy travel guides, for the same reason. Paying twenty bucks for a dead-tree guide to the place I'm going means I don't spend half my vacation reading Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Does anyone here still bother buying cookbooks? Yes. > Would it not be more useful to simply learn how to cook without referring to recipes? They aren't mutually exclusive ideas; if you have a basic understanding of cooking, recipes are great points of departure. > Who needs that level of restaurant-style uniformity and consistency in their own kitchen? Consistency is not the only reason to buy a cookbook.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  Yeah, I buy cookbooks as sources of inspiration.

mcphage 10y ago

> Those recipe books simply became obsolete with ubiquitous Internet access. Countless recipes are open source and freely available. These two sentences contradict each other. You are correct: countless recipes are open source and freely available. However, that leads to the same problem with anything else that's freely available online—quality wildly varies. Without some strict curation of what's available, the expected value of a random recipe you find online is often too low to be worth spending the time and ingredients making. Thus recipe books keep their value—if the book is well reviewed, you can have enough confidence in the recipes it contains to be worth the money and effort to make.

logfromblammo 10y ago
But I don't have any more confidence in reviews than I have in the judgment and reputation of traditional book publishers. All those curation arguments boil down to trademarks and branding. If you don't know enough to judge for yourself, you still have to know enough to judge whether the judge you delegate knows enough to judge for you. Maybe you delegate to Alton Brown because he is on television and you like how he explains things. You're choosing to trust Alton Brown to only put his trademark on things that Alton Brown approves of. But why do you trust Alton Brown? You trust the Food Network to choose celebrity television personality trademarks, perhaps? But their goal is to entice you to buy trademark-branded things from Food Network and their advertisers. Their hosts are hired to make good television shows, not necessarily good demonstrations or recipes. They hired Guy Fieri, too, you know! Based strictly on screen time, he seems better at describing what he is eating than actually cooking anything. If you don't know anything about cooking, you have to trust someone to tell you what to do. How do you know you can trust those reviewers? A lot of them are just food snobs parroting what they learned from previous generations of food snobs. The key precept is that when you are the one doing the choosing, it's less likely that someone is picking you, as their mark, and forcing you into making an illusory choice that always benefits them, no matter what you pick. The argument against curation is that the pool of potential curators is just as deep and variable in quality as the things they curate. So you need a curator for your curators--a reviewer for your reviewers. And then you need a meta-meta-curator to judge the quality of your meta-curators, and it's just tortoises all the way down. I'd prefer to do an objective analysis. Pick a set of recipes for the same dish, make all of them, have an accomplice label each with a letter--so you don't know which is which--and do a blind taste test. Rank the lettered portions according to your own preference, and then your accomplice will let you know which recipe you chose as the best. The same process can inform you as to what brand of tomatoes is best in your homemade pasta sauce, or whether unbroken-grain wild rice is really worth the price premium over the bits and pieces, or which tortillas are best for burrito night, or which beer brand is best for general drinking. Trust the objective measurements. A little bit of science in your kitchen obviates all need for unearned reputation and trust in trademarks. And that makes you a reliable curator for your friends and family, because your meta-curator is the unimpeachable wisdom of objective science!

madcaptenor 10y ago

Basically, you're paying for curation. I buy cookbooks because I'd rather have one recipe that I have some faith will be good than ten recipes that might sort of work. Having a pile of maybe-good recipes is like having a bunch of StackOverflow answers to things that are sort of related to my problem. I also still buy travel guides, for the same reason. Paying twenty bucks for a dead-tree guide to the place I'm going means I don't spend half my vacation reading Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Does anyone here still bother buying cookbooks? Yes. > Would it not be more useful to simply learn how to cook without referring to recipes? They aren't mutually exclusive ideas; if you have a basic understanding of cooking, recipes are great points of departure. > Who needs that level of restaurant-style uniformity and consistency in their own kitchen? Consistency is not the only reason to buy a cookbook.

dllthomas 10y ago
Yeah, I buy cookbooks as sources of inspiration.