And as to the content and business model, we’d love to truly have everything available in one spot, for a monthly subscription. We just need to get the publishers on board.

-Phil, KeepRecipes.com

I agree with you in part. I worked as a cook before I became a writer and I like to approach cooking in more free-form ways. Recipes often serve as a guide or a means of generating new ideas for different combinations of ingredients in classic dishes.

But I still rely heavily on recipes especially if I’m cooking something for the first time, and I think the vast majority of people do. As for chefs not being willing to sell single recipes, you may be right, but I think they might be making a mistake if they take that attitude. Look at music. That industry was album oriented for decades, but iTunes revived the single. Album sales certainly didn’t go away, but selling individual tracks is now a big revenue source for musicians and labels. A small cookbook author that only sold 10,000 cookbooks might see an individual recipe go viral bringing in a huge new revenue stream while also driving people to buy the whole cookbook.

I definitely agree with you that the business model needs to encompass whole cookbooks not just their individual recipes. Larousse Gastronomique would be worthless if you only stripped out its individual recipes since its greatest value is as culinary encyclopedia and reference. The same for Master the Art and innumerable other cookbooks. Ideally I’d like to be able to access a cookbook as a whole in a digital format, but I’d also like to have access to the individual components separately. There’s both an art and practical side to cooking, don’t you think?

I suspect we’ll see subscription models emerge as well. Sites like Cook’s Illustrated already have behind-the-paywall models. They just need to be expanded beyond the content of a single book, publisher or Website. If I could pay a monthly subscription to access every recipe ever written, I would definitely by that service.

I am unsure as to what is salable here. Will Marcella Hazan sell a recipe in the market? I doubt it, because she actively sells complete books! In fact a fantastic model may be to create different models around such books!

The more I use IA the simpler it becomes to create really neat stuff in a heartbeat even if it is just for my own use. iBooks Two are so simple to create and so different from the previous generation, everyone with a new Mac should try them. Think outside the BOX and use all your Mac tricks. They all work in one way or another with IA.

Share with those who don’t have an iPad.

And don’t get me started on the PDFs that you can export to.
WOW!

These are not like your Daddy’s PDFs!