Awesome Food Writing on The iPad

i'm ryan sutton, the new york food critic for bloomberg news.

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Awesome Food Writing on The iPad

Modernist Cuisine, winner of the James Beard Foundation’s “cookbook of the year” award, is too cool for the iPad. It weights 51 pounds. In response, we at The Price Hike and The Bad Deal are celebrating awesome pieces of digital food writing that won’t break your back or your briefcase. The weights listed below tell you how many pounds you’re saving by downloading instead of buying.

Losing weight is a good thing, ain’t it?

The Food of Spain: 5.5 lbs
Authentic Mexican (Bayless): 2.3 lbs
Letters to a Young Chef (Boulud): 0.35 lbs
Hero Food: Seamus Mullen: 3.3 lbs
Momofuku: 2.8 lbs
Momofuku Milk Bar: 2.4 lbs
Volt Ink: 4.5 lbs
A Girl and Her Pig (Bloomfield): 2.4 lbs
Eleven Madison Park: 6 lbs
American Flavor (Carmellini): 3 lbs
Mozza Cookbook:3 lbs
Next 1906: 0 lbs
PDT: 1.9 lbs
Eat With Your Hands (Pelaccio): 3 lbs
Silver Palate Cookbook: 2.4 lbs
The Professional Chef (CIA): 7.4 lbs
Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I): 3.2 lbs
Mastering the Art of French Cooking (II): 2.2 lbs
Four Fish (Greenberg): 0.55 lbs
The Sushi Economy: 1.2 lbs
How Italian Food Conquered the World: 1.4 lbs
Fork it Over (Richman): 0.5 lbs
Imbibe (Wondrich): 1.0 lbs
The Craft of the Cocktail (DeGroff): 2.1 lbs
Blood, Bones & Butter: 0.7 lbs
Omnivore’s Dilemma (That Guy): 1.0 lbs

Total Weight Saved: 64.1 lbs

Each digital cookbook you download doesn’t add a single ounce to your iPad, which can hold all of the above volumes for 1.44 lbs. That’s a GOOD DEAL. The physical tomes would weigh 64.1 lbs altogether. Try putting that in your carry-on. And all the jet fuel saved on shipping is an even BETTER DEAL.

Of course we like to focus on prices here at The Price Hike. Will purchasing iPad cookbooks save you cash? Not necessarily. As the chart below shows, the Amazon.com hardcover price is sometimes cheaper than the iBooks price (assuming you do the free shipping thing like the rest of us cheapskates do)

We believe digital cookbooks are worth the extra bucks, as they’re portable, searchable, and sometimes highly interactive, as is the case with the CIA’s Professional Chef. If you get more, you should pay more. Period. We’ll call these books a STRONG BUY and a GOOD DEAL.