e-cookbooks

[bethesdabakers]

This is sort of a parallel topic to “How Do You Feel About Buying and Using E-Cookbooks?”
 

I’ve written and self-published three books on sourdough bread and microbakery. I do pretty much everything, the bread formulas, the writing, the photographs, the layout. I have them printed to a high standard in small batches of 50-100 and I promote and sell them through my blog thepartisanbaker.

 

I’m thinking about the future. The books sell steadily enough but I’m probably only covering my costs – that’s OK. Not having (or wanting) a television series I’ve pretty much given up on a publishing deal – like commercial yeast I’ve decided publishers are a distraction and surplus to requirements.

 

I’ve now reached the stage where I’m selling almost as many pdf versions as hardcopy and I’m thinking of abandoning print and producing only electronic books. Again I’m only interested in selling direct and not going down the Kindle/Kobo route.

 

Is anyone out there able to offer suggestions about software suitable for cook books, in particular software that would allow the inclusion of interactive spreadsheet tables. What I want to do is present bread formulas in tables that allow the user to change dough weights and quantities.

 

Thanks for any suggestions – hope this is in the right forum.

[catdaddy]

Although I have no knowledge of the software you seek I think your idea is a good one. Interactive spreadsheets in a cookbook would be most useful. I would buy that book.

[Chris Hennes]

Have you considered coding them up essentially as local web pages? You could easily package along some Javascript calculation routines to handle your tables, and with a bit of CSS magic you can make the books adapt to different screen sizes (relatively) easily. This might be a bit too "roll-your-own," but HTML5 gives you some pretty powerful tools to work with, and you wouldn't be tied to any particular device.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

I think he wants to sell them.

[Chris Hennes]

Coding them in HTML doesn't preclude that.

[bethesdabakers]

Thanks for your replies but they illustrate my problem - lack of technical and programming skills.

 

When ebooks first started coming available I thought their real use would be for reference books because of the search effectiveness of databases. So I thought things like cook books would be amongst the first to benefit. But if you take a service like Kindle, there's a very uneven spread of titles that get released in this form and there's no standard presentation or search facility. That's without the swamp of low-grade titles that gum up searches by browsing. But that's a side issue.

 

I just wondered if any of you technically smart foodies out there knew of a simple software package suitable for producing ebooks that is particularly suited to e-cook books (even better if they would take interactive spreadsheets). Or even an example of a well-produced e-cook book.

 

Thanks

 

Mick

[palo]

Hi Mick, I don'knowing you're still looking at this project as it's coming up to a year later.

My view of ebook cookbooks is that I would never buy one. Most ebook readers are designed to read page after page sequentially, flipping around or browsing is a pain. In a cookbook, I like to browse or call up specific ingredients such as beef or poultry etc. Indexes are nice as well, but probably very difficult to setup in an ebook format.

Assuming that receiving some money for your efforts would nice, an alternative might be a website with a registration fee a la America's Test Kitchen which charges a member fee for most of their content. Obviously this would require an upfront cost as you admit to not having the DIY skills. Most importantly you would have to offer perceived value for your site.

Not sure if this helps, but best of luck to you with your goal.

p

[hathor]

Ciao Mike. If most of your e-books are in pdf that's a significant limitation to interactive spreadsheets. As Chris Hennes mentioned, you could set up a webpage to do that and the webpage could be password protected, behind a paywall etc etc. There are many choices. If you did around on some of the e-book publishing sites and forums you can probably find some answers.