Your favorite e-cookbooks (kindle or ipad)
My husband and I are moving to Istanbul in early 2013. It's a transfer through my job so we'll have shipping up to a certain weight covered, but I plan to store most of our kitchen stuff as our new flat will likely have a considerably smaller kitchen than what we have now.
Part of what must go in storage is my collection of about ~70 cookbooks. I'll probably toss 4-5 of my absolute favorites in the shipment. That will be sad. But, it is also an opportunity to get the ipad or kindle version of some of my favorites and those I'm unfamiliar with. I cook pretty much everything, but my tastes skew strongly towards the spicy, south, east and SE Asian, Middle Eastern and Mexican.
So if you use electronic cookbooks, which are some of your favorites? What would be your top five?
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I have lots of ecookbooks like Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Lidia Bastianich's books on my Kindle and the Kindle app for iPad. But the book has to be well indexed - the best have each recipe as a link in the table of contents or index so you can jump quickly. I also bought one Kindle cookbook by Rose Levy Beranbaum that was so sloppily formatted that it was unusable (the line breaks were all wrong so the quantities were impossible to read), but that was a few years ago and the formatting in most books is great.
One big advantage to having cookbooks on the Kindle touch: you can search for an ingredient from the home page and it shows all the results in all your books!
I also like that I have all the Kindle books on my phone too which makes shopping for ingredients on the fly much simpler.
Finally, if you are not a master of english to metric conversions, look for cookbooks that give quantities in both - it makes shopping in Europe as an American expat much more efficient. Examples are Ruhlman's Twenty or Roots by Diane Morgan.
and I'm embarrassed to say I have too many to have a top 5 though Food52 and anything by Nigel Slater or Mark Bittmann are bound to be flexible and delicious. -
Antilope
Nov 29, 2012 09:46 AM
Did you see the story about a woman in Norway buying e-books for her Kindle through Amazon in the UK? Apparently because of DRM copyrights, Amazon wiped out the books from her Kindle, did not refund her money and told her to take her business elsewhere
Here's the story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/....›2 Replies-
re: Antilope
According to the internet grapevine, she pretends to be resident in a different country in order to get a different set of ebooks. Or something similar. Basically a non crime in the old physical book world. The reason amazon can take your books away is because you don't own the kindle books, but simply license them.
However despite this, I will still move to ebooks, jus like I've stopped using CDs. You can buy ebooks elsewhere too. iTunes Store, google play. Amazon is very monopolistic in the ebook market so you might want to support the lesser players.
As for the issue of holding the book long term. It will never beat print. Can you think how many formats we have changed just over the last 20 years?
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I was thrilled to find one of my favorite Chinese cookbooks available for kindle. Barbara Tropp's "The China Moon Cafe" is an all time favorite, out of print, my copy is dying so putting it on my i-pad seemed like a great idea. I am also a fan of Mark Miller's book, "Tacos" it is available as an e-book.
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My mom just discovered the idea of taking cookbooks on the kindle to Europe, instead of lugging the books. Changed her life (although that's a pretty small screen to cook from). She recommends Marcella Hazan, which isn't quite in your oeuvre, but a good Italian meal might be just the ticket after a few months!
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I'm guessing you already checked which of your print favorites are available in ebook form?
My favorites are Mediterranean clay pot cooking by Paula Wolfert.
Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food is available on ebook.
For Indian my favorites are 1000 Indian Recipe by Neelam Batra and The Dance of Spices by Laxmi Hiremath -
Musie
Nov 29, 2012 06:19 AM
I'm yet to find a good free e-cookbook to download, but there is a decent magazine that is free and worth a browse. It's called Sweet Paul, you can read it online or download it to your device.
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Antilope
Nov 28, 2012 09:38 PM
If you like vintage cookbooks (1925 and before) go to Archive.org and there are many you can download for free in kindle and pdf format.
Here's a link:Old Cook Books (late 1800's & early 1900's), links to free online e-copies at Archive.org
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/800296Anyone read dated cookbooks?, links to free online e-copies at Archive.org
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/877005Archive.org
http://archive.org/search.php?query=c... -
I've sold some books online through moola4books at a very decent rate. I remember paying another $0-2 and I could get the e-version of the same book from Amazon. That was done sometime last year.
There're quite a few companies that do books buyback. Get a quote from those as well.
