The healthy sales numbers are a little misleading. Cookbook publishing has been profoundly affected by digital media. And it’s about to be rocked even harder.
Here’s one way it’s changed: Before people could plug words into Google like chicken (the most popular food-search term), there existed an entire sector of cookbooks named things like 101 Great Chicken Recipes.
“We made a bundle off of single-topic books like Crêpes,” says Leslie Jonath, a former editor at Chronicle Books who does contract work for CHOW.com, “but we had to shift our strategy.”
The solution for Chronicle and other cookbook publishers: reposition the cookbook as, says Jonath, “coveted object.” The result: a new paradigm for cookbooks, like the recent Momofuku and Ad Hoc at Home, which are more like art books you’d show off on your coffee table. Publishers’ survival strategy lies in the idea that this type of cookbook gives you an escapist experience that’s quite separate from the workaday nature of an online recipe search.
“A friend of mine typifies where things are going,” says Will Schwalbe, founder and CEO of Cookstr, a site that offers free recipes from famous chefs. “The same day the $400 worth of gorgeous cookbooks he bought arrived, that evening he went to the Web for a recipe to cook that night. He goes through the cookbooks for inspiration and pleasure, but he goes to the Web to figure out what to cook that evening.”
