Take my recipe, please

Baltimore

If a giant corporation began copying entire cookbooks into its computer system, then offering all the recipes over the Internet for free, you might expect the authors to raise a ruckus.

But that is exactly what online bookseller Amazon.com did six months ago. And there was scarcely a discouraging word to be heard at last week’s convention of the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals, a gathering of the tribe of more than 1,000 cookbook writers, chefs and cooking teachers.

In October, Amazon launched a feature called “Search Inside the Book,” which allows you to perform keyword searches through selected books. Type in the words you are interested in and the site gives you a list of every time they appear in the book. Click on one of those citations, and the appropriate page pops up on your computer screen, exactly as it appears in the book. And you can flip to the page before or the page after. Once you’re done with that citation, you can move on to others, until you’ve viewed up to 20% of the book. Though Amazon has disabled the print function for those pages, you can still copy down the text manually or, if you’re the slightest bit computer savvy, execute a screen grab and print what’s on your screen.

That might not mean much for novels or longer works of nonfiction. After all, sampling three pages from Anne Tyler’s “The Accidental Marriage” is barely enough to give you a whiff of one dish in a wonderful banquet. But cookbooks are different: Three pages are enough to give you most recipes in their entirety. And since the conventional wisdom in the publishing industry holds that most buyers cook fewer than three recipes from any book, rather than offering a taste, this begins to seem like giving away the whole meal.

For the most part, though, few authors seem troubled. In general, their reactions are based either on optimism about the value of their books or on pessimism about the difficulty of hanging on to recipes in the first place.

“I know in theory that this doesn’t seem to be a good thing,” says Joyce Goldstein, a San Francisco chef and author of several cookbooks. “But I think most people look at cookbooks for brain stimulus rather than just as a collection of recipes. They buy books for more than just the recipes, text and pictures. They buy books to have the physical object to refer to.”

And, she says, the few people who do just want to lift a few recipes can get them easily enough already. “People do that at the library, and they do that at bookstores.”

Indeed, almost every author has stories about people copying out recipes. Diane Morgan even tells of one particularly brazen example who showed up at one of her book signings. “He put the book down on the table next to me and instead of asking me to sign it, started scribbling down the recipes in his notebook,” she says. “And I’m supposed to be worried about Amazon?”

One of the authors who is disturbed by the “Search Inside” program is Rick Rodgers, a hard-working professional with more than 25 cookbooks to his credit. “I just don’t like to see my content available for free,” he says. “The last time I looked, I’m in this to make money, not to supply free content to websites that, compared to my business, have money to burn.”

Beyond that, he says, there is a principle at stake: When he signed the contracts selling his cookbooks that include those recipes, making them available by the “Search Inside” program was not what he had in mind. He says it is a different situation from his many recipes that are available for free on Epicurious.com (Conde-Nast’s food website that includes material from Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines). “In that case, when I signed the contract selling my work to Bon Appetit, I knew what I was getting into. I knew they’d show up on Epicurious.”

There’s no reason not to think that the Amazon program is designed to encourage sales. After all, Amazon, like everyone else involved -- authors and book publishers -- is in the business of selling books, not giving them away. The idea is to erase one of the biggest hurdles to selling books online by giving shoppers the opportunity to flip through a volume the way they can in a bricks-and-mortar store.

Publishers have to volunteer books to be included, and most say they’ll honor the requests of any authors who don’t want their work to be made available. Amazon has made similar promises.

The Authors Guild, which had opposed the Amazon program when users could print the pages, now advises its members to take a wait-and-see attitude. “In our view, disabling the print function greatly reduces the risk that [the program] will erode sales,” it says. “We believe that most authors should sit tight and see what further technical improvements Amazon makes to the program before deciding whether to pull their books.”

Though hard numbers are difficult to come by, the consensus on the business side seems to be that “Search Inside” has been at least somewhat successful. Shortly after the program began, Amazon said that sales of books included in it were 9% higher than books outside it. The company didn’t, however, break out the figures for cookbooks specifically.

When Daniel Halpern, the editorial director of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, was reached at his office in New York, he had just come from a sales meeting about the Amazon program as it affects cookbooks. “We did a test on a number of books, and everyone thought it was so successful we’re trying to convert as many books as we can. I think it’s a very smart and unique idea.”

Chronicle Books’ Bill LeBlond, who has many cookbooks in the program, acknowledges that Amazon’s commercial muscle may have something to do with publishers’ cooperation, but says he is still cautiously optimistic. “I do think most publishers find Amazon is a great new source of sales, so they’re anxious to support them in this endeavor,” he says. “The jury is still out on whether or not this has increased sales. It’s hard for me to imagine that it would have any huge effect one way or another. Certainly, though, I think the potential benefit of the program is greater than any potential harm. I think it may bring readers to authors they might not have heard of before.”

Anne Willan, director of La Varenne cooking school in France and the author of many cookbooks in the United States and Great Britain, says she’s a supporter of the program. “The more people who look at one’s work, the better off one is,” she says. “If it is good work, people will like it. If they like it, they’ll buy it.”

And as an avid book collector, she believes there is something about holding a printed volume that can’t be supplanted by electrons on a screen. “A book has a personality to it; it’s not just pictures and recipes and words. It has shape and feel. Those are things you only get when you own it.”

Author and television personality Nathalie Dupree says her main concern is that rather than too much material, browsers may not be getting enough. By getting only three pages, they might be missing key information -- maybe a sauce, or serving instructions, will be left off.

She’s not worried, however, about her ownership of the recipes. After all, she sends them out free to anyone who e-mails her asking for one. She says she does this an average of 50 times a month as it is.

“Recipes are not what my books are about,” she says. “They’re about stories, background, planning, organization.... If someone just wants the recipes, they’re missing the whole point.”