Coming out of lurking mode just to say how amazing this book is and to personally say "thanks" to Nathan and Co for putting this together. You would think there would be filler in a 2400 page book, but no -- just about everything is valuable and/or entertaining its its own right. Its a joy to read. Incredibly vast and expansive in scope yet somehow equally concise. I found myself picking up a volume, hoping to get right into the recipes and techniques, but got derailed from the beginning delving into the "History" section for an hour. History of the plated dish - who knew? Same with the other volumes - I've never thought 15 pages breaking down grilling vs broiling would be so entertaining and informative. And when I finally got to recipes, the parametric format captures so much useful information on just a page or two. I can really appreciate/see the thought, care and effort taken to first track down such a vast amount of information and then distill it down into such a concise user friendly format. Forget cookbooks - I don't think I have ever seen a book on anything take so much information from so many disparate sources and then present it so clearly and effectively. I have a hard time seeing this book distributed as a pdf and agree that a digital version would have to be pretty close to state-of-the-art in presentation to match the effectiveness of the printed version. I also have to say its worth the price - what you might expect to get out of spending your whole $600 budget on a single "book". So I am really grateful that someone took the effort to do this, especially someone with the talent and drive to do it so well.