Cookbook Revolution

Cookbooks are making their way to iPads and e-readers. Will they be used?

From a story in the Chicago Tribune...

"I think the future of a lot of cooking information is electronic, but we don't know how it's going to shake out yet," says Molly O'Neill, whose latest cookbook, "This American Burger: The Meat, The Heat and the Recipes" was published solely as an e-book.

"It's sort of like the days when audio came to film. People tried to take what worked onstage and use it in film, and it didn't work. The demands of the media are very different."

Until recently, cookbooks had been challenging to publish electronically, says Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant. E-book software is good at reproducing pages of text, but it hasn't been able to handle elaborately designed layouts that integrate mouthwatering photographs — elements that are the core of most modern cookbooks. That's changing, particularly for iPad and Nook.

More flexibility in design is part of the reason "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" is now being published as an e-book, says Paul Bogaards, publicist for Knopf Doubleday.