Condé Nast owns the magazine Bon Appétit, the extremely popular food cooking and lifestyle portal Epicurious as well as the Gourmet brand, which no longer exists as a print magazine but lives on as a Web publication and in TV programming and cookbooks. Though Condé Nast didn’t detail its exact plans to integrate ZipList’s universal recipe box service into its own Web portals, it appears to be letting the company maintain its independent status for the time being. Here’s the statement issued by Condé Nast president Bob Sauerberg:

“This acquisition enables Condé Nast to deliver on our commitment to marry quality content and innovative technology, giving unprecedented scale as we focus on creating additional revenue streams in the digital space. … Our goal is to build ZipList as an independent company while collaborating with our food brands to integrate its core technology, and to create partnerships that allow other companies to do the same.”

Like other recipe clipping apps, ZipList allows its users to grab dish ideas they find on different food sites and store them in a digital recipe box. The difference is ZipList doesn’t view itself as a destination site or portal like Paprika or KeepRecipes. Instead it acts as the recipe-saving service and grocery list-generating app for 6,500 food sites and blogs. But rather than keep those recipes and lists trapped in thousands of different mutually exclusive recipe boxes, ZipList has made its box universal, accessible through the same login credentials on any partners’ sites as well as its own Web portal.

That puts Condé Nast in a somewhat awkward position. Presumably it will add ZipList’s universal recipe box to Epicurious and its other Web properties, which means customers will be aggregating and accessing its competitors’ recipes from within Condé Nast’s sites. Likewise, some of Condé Nast’s biggest rivals in the food biz — MarthaStewart.com for one — use ZipList’s service. If they continue to work with ZipList they will do so knowing they’re supporting one of their biggest competitors in food and lifestyle media. It will be interesting to see how Condé Nast walks this line.

Condé Nast’s Sauerberg and Martha Stewart Living president and COO Lisa Gersh will both be appearing at paidContent 2012, May 23 in New York City.

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KeepRecipes is starting out small. It has signed deals to distribute the contents of five cookbooks from two publishers, Gooseberry Patch’s 101 Recipes and Harvard Common Press’ Not Your Mother’s cookbook series. The site is also hosting individual recipes from seven famous chefs and authors, including Masaharu Morimoto of Iron Chef fame and New York Times food columnist and cookbook writer Mark Bittman, giving the portal’s members access to 1,000 different dishes, priced at 99 cents each. But CEO and founder Phil Michaelson said he is hoping he can build off that small core of cuisine, proving to publishers that there is money to be made distributing their cookbooks online and convincing consumers that some online recipes are worth paying for.

The comparison to iTunes isn’t just a gimmick. It is uncanny how closely KeepRecipes is following Apple’s music distribution model, all the way down to direct integration with the iPhone. The recipes are bought and stored through KeepRecipes’ online portal, where they can be sorted and searched, organized into collections — recipe playlists, if you will — and shared with up to five friends in the KeepRecipes community. A mobile app allows members to access their collections through the iPhone.

What’s more, those paid recipes become part of the members’ overall digital recipe collection within the portal. Michaelson said KeepRecipes is trying to do away with the concept of the digital cookbook as just another e-book, trapped in between electronic covers. Instead, the portal aims to help its members build a comprehensive digital cooking library — a task I can tell you from experience is almost impossible to do — by bringing in recipes from multiple sources.

“We want to provide a place where you can keep all of your recipes in one spot, whether it’s your family recipe, a web recipe or premium content,” Michaelson said.

Recipes found online can be grabbed through KeepRecipes’ bookmarklet or by entering its URL through the website. You can enter your own recipes manually, and you can “keep” any nonpaid recipe in your friends’ collections. Just as customers can annotate, comment and add pictures to their own recipes, they can do the same for the ones they have paid for.

The remaining obstacle to building a complete digital cooking library is integrating the thousands of recipes that sit bound on our bookshelves. But Michaelson is working on that problem as well. KeepRecipes is working with its publishers to allow members to download the digital contents of their physical books for a fee of $5 per cookbook.

If you read my post earlier this month on why digital recipes need to emulate digital music, this idea might sound eerily familiar. I thought I was being pretty creative at the time, but it turns out Michaelson and his developers have been developing that concept since KeepRecipes’ inception. Michaelson has already found solutions for problems that I merely posed, such as how to deal with digital rights management and controlling distribution.

In fact, KeepRecipes seems to have all the tools in place to make a comprehensive online recipe library possible. What it lacks is scale. That is understandable, considering KeepRecipes only launched in August, has only 10,000 members — of which about 15 percent are active — and is still in its early stages of funding. For a company of that size to have attracted the attention of even small publishing houses is impressive.

Michaelson said he has found cookbook publishers are eager to go online, but many of them see the inherent limitations of the e-book format, which is why they are working with KeepRecipes. Publishers are also concerned that once they make their cookbooks more digitally accessible, their recipes will escape into the wilds of Internet, where they won’t be able to charge for them. “They are very intrigued by the idea of a social portal and sharing on Facebook and Twitter,” Michaelson said. “But they’re also fearful of a total loss of control.”

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While the Web and other digital technologies have greatly amplified our exposure to new foods and cuisines, how we store, organize, and sort that wealth of culinary data remains practically unchanged. Recipes are still largely isolated on the Web, either residing on Websites, trapped in e-cookbooks or buried within a plethora of cooking apps. They’re no different than the cookbooks sitting on my shelves or the hand-scrawled recipe cards in a recipe box – each self-contained and isolated from the recipes or recipe collections around them.

What’s needed is a standard recipe media format that can be shared between applications and the Web. Like the MP3 or ACC format used in music, a recipe needs to become a standardized digital good, one that can be bought, sold, shared, edited and annotated. A recipe file could be rights-protected or it could be DRM-free, but ultimately it would have to be readable by any recipe application, browser or e-book reader.

Testing the limits of today’s recipe tools

Last month, I experimented with creating a digital recipe library using a few of the most popular recipe aggregation apps and Web portals, but I found that piecing together all of the different recipes available online into a coherent collection was a practical impossibility. KeepRecipes, Paprika, MacGourmet, and numerous other services all scrape recipes from Webpages and turn them into neatly cataloged recipe files. While all of them can easily grab recipes from the most commonly sourced cooking sites such as the Food Network or Epicurious, they all fail to identify and capture recipes outside of those big food portals. Most cooking blogs – where a lot of truly innovative cooking resides – might as well not exist to those apps.

KeepRecipes co-founder Phil Michaelson said this is a universal problem for any recipe aggregation tool because there’s no standard format for recipe markup on the Web. KeepRecipes can’t grab a recipe if it can’t identify it as one or distinguish between the ingredients, measurements and directions sections on the page.

The big food sites are more easily deciphered because they have all adopted the recipe markup formats promoted by Google and Facebook. Called hRecipe, the microformat provides a common language for search engines and other Websites to index and interpret recipe data. Recipe cataloging tools like KeepRecipes can just as easily use those markup tags to build recipe files, Michaelson said.

But there is some resistance to the widespread adoption of those formats. Michaelson said in an e-mail:

What we need is for more newspaper Websites, recipe bloggers, and recipe search engines to embrace these markup languages.  We also need less toolbars and iframes around recipe content that disrupt sharing and parsing of Webpages. We see resistance to adding technology (that is, a recipe markup language) that doesn’t have a clearly predictable [return on investment].  Everyone from Tumblr.com and WordPress.com (which power many recipe blogs) to TheKitchn.com would empower recipe authors to publish using a recipe markup format if they could estimate the ROI.

According to Michaelson, KeepRecipes tries hard to provide that financial incentive to bloggers and big food sites alike. It will only scrape a full recipe after a member visits the Website on which it’s posted. Because KeepRecipes is also a cooking community portal, allowing members to share dishes, particular recipes have the potential of going viral, driving curious cooks back to the dishes’ sources.

But ultimately the concept of a recipe aggregator stands in the face of whatever business model a recipe publisher is using. Whether you’re the Food Network, a cookbook author, or a small-time blogger, you want to get to paid, whether it’s through advertising revenues generated by page views, selling e-cookbooks and individual recipes, or just simple recognition. If you make it easier to traffic in recipes digitally, those business models are threatened.

There’s money to be made in digital food

That’s the beauty of recipe file format. Like any other digital media it can be rights protected. Sure, there will be lots of cases of infringement, but every other form of media faces the same problem, and it’s always been easier to steal a copyrighted recipe than it is to pirate a song or movie. Today you can cut and paste a recipe from a website into an email or document or grab it with a digital notepad service like Evernote.

Adjusting business models to accommodate new digital recipe media would be easy for some. If you buy a cookbook, the publisher should allow you to download the complete library of recipes into any recipe management app, just like many music distributors have begun to encourage the revival of vinyl by packaging an album’s digital tracks with the analog record. E-cookbook publishers should do the same.

For Web-based recipe collections, the model may be a bit more difficult. An online subscription-recipe service like Cook’s Illustrated could extend its business model to include recipe downloads, allowing you to access and store its entire library as long as you are a paying member, just as Rhapsody does for music media. The New York Times and Food & Wine could make free downloads conditional on print or digital subscriptions to their publications.

Sites that depend on advertising might have difficulty making those revenue schemes work, but there’s plenty they can do to bring customers back to their sites, whether through video tutorials or recommendation engines. A food site also could charge a nominal fee to download a recipe, say 25 cents, rather than read it through the browser. Social networking recipe sites like AllRecipes.com could use paid downloads of recipe files as a way to distribute revenues among its members, creating an everyman’s recipe store.

Long live the cookbook!

At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis declared that digital cookbook is a far more useful tool than the traditional printed-and-bound cookbook, and he had a pretty good example to back up his claim. Inkling publishes the digital version of the The Professional Chef, the Culinary Institute of America’s classic teaching cookbook. The shelf version is an imposing tome, but Inkling has done plenty to make Pro Chef accessible to a wider audience by stuffing it into the iPad and optimizing the cookbook for a digital medium.

Inkling laces its electronic pages with more than 100 video tutorials and other multimedia. It makes the cookbook endlessly and easily searchable in ways a standard cookbook index is not. You can annotate and bookmark favorite recipes, rather than scrawl illegibly on or dog-ear a bound page.

But a digital cookbook is still a book – you have endless amounts of flexibility within the application or e-book itself, but it remains isolated in the digital ether. No one cooks from a single cookbook, and no cookbook can claim it holds every recipe a home chef would ever need. Though Inkling has created an extremely versatile and useful tool, I would argue that by sticking with the e-book format Inkling saddled it with needless limitations.

A truly useful cookbook can’t be treated like a novel or a textbook. A cookbook is a collection of individual recipes as much as it is a self-contained work, just an album is made up of individual songs. Publishers need to distribute the parts as well as the whole.

I’m not advocating the demise of the cookbook here — far from it. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is an exhaustive compendium of classic recipes, but it’s also an expression of the philosophical and culinary conviction of its principle author, Julia Child. Larousse Gastronomique is replete with recipes, but it’s more an encyclopedia of cuisine and technique than a true cookbook. If digitizing our cookbooks means atomizing the art and science of cuisine into hundreds of thousands of non-contextualized recipes, then we will have lost a huge resource.

That said, the practical side of cooking is just as – if not more — important than its art. Everyone must eat and most of us have little time to cook. The Internet and other digital technologies have given us access to countless new dishes and methods for cooking. Now those technologies  just need to provide us with a way to organize that vast quantity of information so we can actually get down to the business of cooking.

Cookbook/iPod image courtesy of Flickr user LizMarie_AK

Good Housekeeping Cookbook image courtesy of Flickr user Lori L. Stalteri

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For more read the follow-up post: A better recipe for digital cuisine

Remember those roasted Brussels sprouts you made last year for the holidays? The whole family loved them — even Uncle Enzo, who normally turns green whenever forced to eat something of that color. Your family now thinks you’re a kitchen wizard and wants you to repeat your culinary feat this weekend, but you can’t seem to find the recipe. You remember discovering it online last year after having one egg nog too many, but you can’t remember where. The copy you printed out has long since made its way into a recycling bin, and when you type “Roasted Brussels Sprouts” into Google you get thousands of listings. If you can find that recipe again, you must remember to save it. But how?

When you find that perfect ingredient combination for pumpkin pie filling or the ideal technique for roasting Cornish game hens, the web doesn’t give you many options for holding onto it. You can bookmark recipes that have a dedicated URL; you can cut and paste recipes into an email or document; or you can hit the ‘print’ button, but these are all pretty clunky ways of storing ideas you want for quick reference. Many of the big recipe sites  now have digital recipe boxes behind their login screens, but those are of limited use as well. Maintaining dozens of different accounts with food sites is not only a pain, but by distributing my recipes all over the Internet, I can’t browse, sort or search them as whole.

This year, I decided to build a digital recipe library using what tools were available on the web and through various app stores. It turns out there are plenty of recipe aggregation tools out there, but I wound up focusing on three: Paprika’s Mac and iPad apps, MacGourmet’s Mac App, and KeepRecipes’ web portal. I discovered they’re all great services for saving and cataloging specific types of recipes, but they all share a single huge limitation.

First, the good

KeepRecipes is both a recipe library and a community cooking portal. You can enter your own creations or cut and paste recipes manually into its fields, but the really handy tool is a button you install in the bookmarks bar of your browser. If you find a recipe you want to save for a later date, you hit the button and up pops a recipe window with the ingredients, directions, notes and pictures pre-entered – theoretically, at least – into the appropriate fields. You tap the save button and the recipe is stored in your digital online library forever more.

Paprika's recipe management app for Mac

Paprika and MacGourmet perform similar types of website scraping, but they do so within embedded browsers. You surf to a recipe page through the apps, and when you press the save button, both generate digital recipe cards with the relevant fields for ingredients, their individual measurements, directions, notes, even dietary information and photos. Both apps go beyond just storing recipes, though. With both, you can create shopping lists with one click on a recipe and even generate weekly meal planners. Paprika and MacGourmet both have iPad and iPhone apps as well, allowing you to sync shopping lists and recipes between devices. That’s quite handy if you don’t know what want you cook before you go to the store or if you happen upon some tremendous deal on lamb chops and change your meal plans on the fly.

These are all great apps, though each performs some functions better than others. If I wanted to write my own digital cookbook using my own recipes (which right now are hand-scrawled into a dog-eared notebook), I’d go with MacGourmet. It allows you to enter a tremendous level of detail for each recipe, all of it in relevant searchable fields. The interface is a bit clunky, though, compared to Paprika’s more streamlined look. Paprika also seemed to have the better scraping algorithms, putting the right data into the right boxes, and it was able to grab a lot recipes MacGourmet couldn’t. It also generated far more useful shopping lists, with simple lists of ingredients and quantities you can check off your iPad with a finger flick.

As for KeepRecipes, I loved the concept more than I loved the actual implementation. Its web-based service is not only free; it’s very democratic. I could access my recipes from any browser, even the microbrowser on my Android phone. MacGourmet and Paprika require you to download – and pay for – different versions of their apps on your different devices, and neither supports Android. (I suppose we Android users are expected to survive on take-out Chinese and frozen pizzas.)

KeepRecipes also has built up an extensive community so you can share recipes with friends, follow what other people are cooking and promote favorite dishes. The problem is that KeepRecipe’s scraping function is pretty basic. It’s really entering data into a few text fields rather than cataloging the components of a recipe, and it often fails to scrape the right or any information at all from a recipe page. KeepRecipes’ scraping methodology was definitely the most wonky, but it wasn’t alone.  It’s a problem facing any app trying to decipher a recipe from the seemingly random HTML code of a website.

Now the bad

The scraping algorithms of all three apps are optimized to read the recipe formats of most popular cooking websites such as the Food Network or Epicurious. Once you go outside the list, the apps can’t recognize the recipe staring at you from your screen.

Of course, those big cooking sites hold huge repositories of recipes for any dish imaginable. If you love Alton Brown (which I do) and Emeril Lagasse (which I don’t), then you can create a substantial recipe library by mining the Food Network site alone. But the best food ideas aren’t necessarily on those big sites. Some of the most innovative – and tasty – stuff is going on at the innumerable culinary blogs popping up all over the web. Every time I tried to grab a dish off of the recipe blog aggregator Gojee, I saw the same message telling me MacGourmet or Paprika couldn’t detect the recipe or the same KeepRecipes window with a bunch of blank fields.

Then there’s the issue of compatibility. Once I save a recipe with Paprika or MacGourmet, they’re trapped inside those applications, stored in a proprietary format. KeepRecipes has great community sharing features, but my recipes are still locked within that community. Since I might find each app useful for different things, at the end of the day, I wind up three separate digital recipe collections.

And what about the quarter-metric-ton of dead trees on my bookshelves? While I’m increasingly going to the web for my recipe ideas, Julia Child’s (et al) Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking and Larousse Gastronomique are my culinary bibles. Even if I can build a digital catalog of my favorite dishes from the web, how do I bring these culinary staples (which make up the lion’s share of my cooking) into that new digital library?

If I were to pick one app, I’d probably go with Paprika, since it was the easiest to use and had the best success rate in transforming online recipes into usable digital recipe cards. But I’m under no illusions that I can use Paprika as the foundation of a comprehensive digital recipe library. When it comes to food, the web has made finding a wealth of new ideas and dishes much easier, but when it comes to storing and organizing those concepts, the web has effectively changed nothing from the days of the printed cookbook. My recipes are still bound in tomes. Some of those tomes are now digital, but they’re just as isolated from one another as the cookbooks on my shelves.

Note: While this post identifies the problem of cataloging recipes in the digital age, my follow-up post explores a possible solution. For more read A better recipe for digital cuisine: Why digital cookbooks need to emulate digital music

Bookshelf image courtesy of Flickr user Paper Cat
Cookbook image courtesy of Flickr user Lori L. Stalteri

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Later this week Inkling will release The Professional Chef, the official textbook of The Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the Hyde Park, New York-based chef’s school founded in 1946. The book, which is also known as “Pro Chef,” is the assigned culinary textbook for all students at CIA and a number of other culinary schools and has been called “the bible for all chefs” by famed French chef Paul Bocuse. Pro Chef has become a best-selling book for home chefs as well.

Pro Chef for Inkling screenshot (click to enlarge)

I’ve spent some time playing with Inkling’s version of Pro Chef, and it’s pretty great — it’s such an informative text that it could be intimidating, but the Inkling version makes it particularly accessible. I think it should have special appeal to the amateur market because Inkling’s format allows people to ease into the book piecemeal, rather than commit to the whole thing (the hardcover version of Pro Chef is a behemoth, with a list price of $75 and clocking in at 1232 pages.)

On Inkling, people can buy individual chapters of the book for $2.99 (there are 36 chapters in all) or the entire text for $49.99. Pro Chef on Inkling also has extra multimedia content including 100+ high-definition video tutorials of such techniques as how to slice cabbage or debone a lamb leg, which is really helpful if you aren’t actually attending a culinary school in real life.

In all, it’s a smart move for Inkling. The college textbook market is, of course, massive — worth some $5 billion in revenues annually — but it’s always good for a company to have a bit of variety in its user base. Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis tells me that Inkling’s bread and butter will continue to be bringing interactive versions of college textbooks to the iPad, but that this is the first of a series of new titles that the company expects will bridge the gap between academia and the real world. With higher education booming and tablets becoming more popular by the day, Inkling could have lots of growth ahead.

Here’s a video of Pro Chef on the Inkling in action:

Cook Like the Pros – The Professional Chef from Inkling on Vimeo.

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Many people have a collection of recipe clippings culled from magazines, newspapers, and the supermarket. But where do you put the clippings? Ideally, you type it out and put it in a recipe manager (my favorite is SousChef). If I only had the time. What I do instead is either scan the recipe directly into iPhoto from my Mac, or if I can’t easily clip the recipe, I’ll take a picture of it with my iPhone. When I see a recipe I like on the web, I take a screen shot to easily get it into iPhoto, too.

Once in the iPhoto, I rename the photo to match the actual recipe title, and then in the keywords I put the important ingredients that I’d need to know when shopping such as “chicken breast” or “celery.” This is also a handy way to search for recipes when something is on sale or in season. Then I just drop it in an album I call “Cookbook.”

I also have an album called “Current Recipes.” I, and other members of the family, will put especially interesting recipes into this album. I’ll sort them in the album to create both variety and efficiency in shopping. I have the recipes synced to a password-protected MobileMe site as well for ease of browsing. With iCloud’s Photo Stream feature, which arrives in September, this should be even easier.

You can also sync those albums to your iPhone and iPad so that you always have all your recipes close at hand, which can be useful if you stop in at the grocery store on the way home from work. Not only is this a great reference, but recipes can be easily emailed from the iPhone to whoever’s doing the shopping.

With the recipes in digital form, cooking with iOS in the kitchen is also breeze. I’ll use either my iPad or my iPhone to check out the recipe(s) I need. After cooking, I’ll return to iPhoto and modify the ratings and notes for the recipe so we know whether to make it again. If it was lousy, we delete it from the album.

Keeping my recipes in iPhoto has reduced our reliance on eating take-out, as well as being a great way for everyone to contribute to dinner. Considering every Mac comes with iPhoto, it’s also cost-effective and easy, too. Anything you think might add even more to my system?

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