Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Cookbook

This is because they have access to a traditional printer and are able to order the volume needed for that price. A print on demand book from amazon that is 200 pages, full color will cost ~$15/book. But, that price is fixed whether you buy 1 or 5000 copies. Add in amazon's cut and you're looking to make 30% for each sale on amazon.com. If they handle distribution to bookstores you're looking at a 10% cut.

This is the option available to most self publishers and the margins are not that much better than going with a traditional publisher. Especially, because the author needs to front all of the costs for editing, design, etc.

All those curation arguments boil down to trademarks and branding. If you don't know enough to judge for yourself, you still have to know enough to judge whether the judge you delegate knows enough to judge for you.

Maybe you delegate to Alton Brown because he is on television and you like how he explains things. You're choosing to trust Alton Brown to only put his trademark on things that Alton Brown approves of. But why do you trust Alton Brown? You trust the Food Network to choose celebrity television personality trademarks, perhaps? But their goal is to entice you to buy trademark-branded things from Food Network and their advertisers. Their hosts are hired to make good television shows, not necessarily good demonstrations or recipes. They hired Guy Fieri, too, you know! Based strictly on screen time, he seems better at describing what he is eating than actually cooking anything.

If you don't know anything about cooking, you have to trust someone to tell you what to do. How do you know you can trust those reviewers? A lot of them are just food snobs parroting what they learned from previous generations of food snobs.

The key precept is that when you are the one doing the choosing, it's less likely that someone is picking you, as their mark, and forcing you into making an illusory choice that always benefits them, no matter what you pick.

The argument against curation is that the pool of potential curators is just as deep and variable in quality as the things they curate. So you need a curator for your curators--a reviewer for your reviewers. And then you need a meta-meta-curator to judge the quality of your meta-curators, and it's just tortoises all the way down. I'd prefer to do an objective analysis. Pick a set of recipes for the same dish, make all of them, have an accomplice label each with a letter--so you don't know which is which--and do a blind taste test. Rank the lettered portions according to your own preference, and then your accomplice will let you know which recipe you chose as the best. The same process can inform you as to what brand of tomatoes is best in your homemade pasta sauce, or whether unbroken-grain wild rice is really worth the price premium over the bits and pieces, or which tortillas are best for burrito night, or which beer brand is best for general drinking.

Trust the objective measurements. A little bit of science in your kitchen obviates all need for unearned reputation and trust in trademarks.

And that makes you a reliable curator for your friends and family, because your meta-curator is the unimpeachable wisdom of objective science!

but my opinion is quite different.

i've been active in the e-book sphere for a long time, and i've studied e-book authoring quite extensively, even programming some systems myself, and i think leanpub is quite good. i liked it better when you didn't have to make a lump-sum payment in advance, but even now, i think it's one of the best systems around, especially for people who don't want to code their own solution. and leanpub gives you access to a customer-base that's more than large enough to warrant the small percentage they skim off your sales.

Yes.

> Would it not be more useful to simply learn how to cook without referring to recipes?

They aren't mutually exclusive ideas; if you have a basic understanding of cooking, recipes are great points of departure.

> Who needs that level of restaurant-style uniformity and consistency in their own kitchen?

Consistency is not the only reason to buy a cookbook.

Because I've found the information from his shows has been useful in improving the output of my own cooking. Otherwise, I wouldn't have bought any of his cookbooks.

> If you don't know anything about cooking, you have to trust someone to tell you what to do.

Cookbooks are generally not written for, or primarily marketed to, people who don't know anything about cooking.

> So you need a curator for your curators--a reviewer for your reviewers.

That's what acquaintances you know who have demonstrated proficiency in the kitchen are for.

> Pick a set of recipes for the same dish, make all of them, have an accomplice label each with a letter--so you don't know which is which--and do a blind taste test. Rank the lettered portions according to your own preference, and then your accomplice will let you know which recipe you chose as the best.

This is optimal, but an extreme time and resource hog if you are going to do it with a wide enough range of recipes to be meaningful with no prior filter, and also logistically problematic because many dishes are sensitive to holding time (and because of variability in even skilled execution, you need to execute each recipe multiple times, grade them all, and do statistical aggregation of the results), so you need lots of parallel cooks and parallel kitchens to effectively execute this.

> Trust the objective measurements.

Ranking according to your preference is subjective measurement.

> A little bit of science in your kitchen obviates all need for unearned reputation and trust in trademarks.

If you ignore time and resource constraints, it avoids the need for curation (whether earned or not), in practice, to be usefully used, you need a curated filter in front of the process (but then, it also feeds back into the process of meta-curation by providing information on the reliability of curators.)