This morning Lynn Andriani, who oversees PW‘s Cooking The Books e-newsletter, moderated a cookbook panel that brought out an SRO crowd, and uncovered some surprising areas of agreement and disagreement among the panelists. These included Clarkson Potter‘s Doris Cooper, EatYourBooks.com‘s Jane Kelly, Cookstr‘s Will Schwalbe, and Bruce Shaw from the Harvard Common Press.
Everyone agreed that cookbooks are “souvenirs,” and gifts that people “open for inspiration,” but Cooper argued that “A good cookbook and a good website deliver the same experience: good content, great writing, fabulous photography.” Clarkson Potter is very careful with how many recipes it allow bloggers (who increasingly request exclusivity) and websites to use—usually about six. This is because, while recipes can entice a reader to buy the book, there is the fear that people will instead gather them up and feel that they don’t need to own the book. Having said that, however, Cooper also thinks that “cookbooks lend themselves to community,” and loves the idea of readers talking about their favorite recipes and authors.
Will Schwalbe was, as ever, the most upbeat of the panelists, and brought up the fact that the marthastewart.com website has about 12,000 recipes on it — and yet her cookbooks (published by Clarkson Potter) sell extremely well. Unlike most other CP authors, she also has Apps for some of her books.
At the moment, some publishers are selling vertical content (eg vegan, recipes for diabetics or at the other extreme, BBQ) to websites that aggregate recipes. Bruce Shaw is involved with Yummly, and hopes to move soon to “curated premium content.” Most of the panelists believed that at some point soon, publishers would be able to sell individual recipes for micropayments.
The panel was — surprisingly — in agreement that most cookbooks would not benefit from having an app. Mark Bittman aside (and only because his book has more than two thousand recipes, which benefits from being searched and sorted), apps are too expensive to make economic sense, and don’t accomplish what a well conceived and packaged book does. However, enhanced ebooks do make sense, if the accompanying video is useful.
What needs to be tackled, if cookbook publishers want to monetize their content online, said Schwalbe, is for some sort of standards to be set, so that when recipes are scanned for ingredients and quantities, everyone is using the same measurements. Kelly, whose website indexes cookbooks for easier access of recipes, heartily concurred.
The panelists also agreed that the cookbook business was booming — when the author has a following, the book is well written, the pictures are mouthwatering — and someone’s looking for a nice gift, maybe even for themselves.
