The Cookbooks of the FUTURE

The Cookbooks of the FUTURE

With all the Internet access of free recipes, people believe cookbooks will disappear.

Relax, this will not happen, as it did not happen to radio went television showed up. We will want printed material, at least for a couple of generations. There is nothing like walking into a bookstore, sitting there, drinking some coffee and looking through a book. It may be, if the book is very good, that is, has important, long living information, that we might buy both the printed and the e-book.

There are two kinds of cookbook readers. Those that like to look at the images, and get ideas and go ahead and cook something like it someday. Then there is a second group that buys the books to use them in the kitchen and actually do the recipes as they are written in the book. What will each choose? I could guess that the ones that actually cook, might use the e’format if they don´t care about taking the tablet to the kitchen and letting flour and eggs near it. Then again, the ones that like to look at the books roughly and keep them, as a future reference might want to hold to the written format, just because the e’book becomes a file. How long will these files last? Will the format change? Will we be able to read the books 10 years, 20 years from now?

Or will e’books change as music formats did with time; reels, cassettes, cd´s, dvd´s and mp3´s.

One thing is for sure going to happen. Content is going to change. Young readers want to do different things with cookbooks. Some want nothing to do with them, others want to discover what the mystery is, some only have them as decoration … we need to find out what kind of content and format they want. There will definitely be shrinkage of the amount of topics. This might actually be good for the industry, to sell more books from fewer authors. Not fair to many, but we must adapt. Quick cooking guides, there are millions; in print, on the web, and in free media. Companies selling products will be ones to gear customers towards written formats as they are ones that can keep using cookbooks as a part of their marketing and sales. I think people want to touch things that are given to them and product makers can give them away or sell them one on one.

Let us see what happens, but the fact that companies keep 30% of books on the Internet is not at all bad. Most writers only get a very small percentage of sales anyways. Who gets the money might be different depending on product innovations we might not even think of today. i.e. ipod!

Some publishers, owning book clubs have the biggest sales and can jump from paper to electronic sales, and have done so, but they must be very creative.