As anyone with more than a few cookbooks on their shelf knows, it can be a little time consuming to search through your recipes to find ones that you like. They have varying degrees of quality with regards to their index and may or may not be searchable by ingredient. So a couple of years ago I had a flash of brilliance: if you buy a cookbook, why don’t publishers include a copy of the book’s recipes in a standardized format (RecipeML or whatever format it is they’re using these days) so that people can import them into a recipe app and have all their cookbooks searchable? After all, you’ve bought the rights to use the recipes, why not offer up all the functionality possible?
This won’t happen in the near future, I’m sure. It would take agreeing on a standard (first), some sort of protection against bootlegging (second), and extra work on the publisher’s part (third). But, you’ve gotta admit, from a user perspective, this would be pretty slick.
Posted in Food and Beverage