Why can’t digital cookbooks be more like print? This week Epicurious.com began offering 75 Random House e-cookbooks by bestselling authors like Bobby Flay, Alice Waters, and Lidia Bastianich that are intended to do just that. The digital cookbooks, which range in price from $10.99 to $24.99, open so that they look like print cookbooks. But the recipes can be imported by Epicurious users into digital “recipe boxes,” which allow the creation of shopping lists.
The e-cookbooks are being published in conjunction with Berkeley, Calif.-based TasteBook, in which both Random House and Epicurious parent company Condé Nast are investors. The company’s recently introduced social e-book platform for cookbooks, TasteBook Edition, provides social and personal content along with a suite of tools such as recipe search, shopping lists, ratings and reviews, and personal notes.
