SharedBook Partners with Food Social Networking Site BigOven.com
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 4/3/2008 9:15:00 AM
SharedBook Inc. has formed a partnership with the food-oriented social networking site BigOven.com. It isn’t the first time SharedBook, a “reverse publishing” site that allows users to create custom books from Web site content, has formed a deal to allow users to create their own cookbooks, but it is the first time users will be able to resell the cookbooks they make, albeit for fundraising or other nonprofit purposes.
BigOven is a four-year-old site with 90,000 registered users and more than 160,000 free recipes. With the SharedBook arrangement, users will be able to build a 20-page book, personalized with their own photos, notes and layout. Pricing begins at $29.95 for a perfect-bound paperback and $38.99 for a coil in case bound format for lay-flat use in the kitchen; shipping is free. Additional pages can be added at a rate of $1 for each additional two pages. For customers with large collections of handwritten or electronic recipes, White Glove Service is available for an additional $25. Customers can send recipes to SharedBook for scanning or submit them electronically if the content is already in Word or e-mail format. SharedBook will then add the recipes to the cookbook.
SharedBook CEO Caroline Vanderlip said, “We’re always looking for categories where people are accustomed to buying books,” and that making a physical book out of online recipes is “a very small leap” for BigOven users.
On all of SharedBooks’s other products—it has personalized book arrangements with Yosemite National Park, FuneralNet, the Iowa 4-H Foundation, Little League International and Regent Seven Seas Cruises, among other organizations, and announced a partnership with Random House in January of this year—customers cannot resell the books they make. But Vanderlip said BigOven wanted its customers to be able to resell the book for fundraising purposes, and SharedBook changed its user agreement so that BigOven users can resell their books. Vanderlip said the content in question is user-generated, not copyrighted.
SharedBook, which was founded in 2002, partnered with AllRecipes.com last year, and users can make cookbooks with recipes culled from that site as well. Vanderlip said an AllRecipes cookbook differs from a BigOven cookbook in that it lacks the collaborative element that exists on BigOven, where members can form groups and share recipes with each other, and then turn their groups’ recipes into a book.
SharedBook is not the only technology that allows people to create custom cookbooks out of online recipes; late last year, TasteBook launched a service wherein users can make cookbooks using recipes from Epicurious.com and other sources.
