by Linda Spradlin

Created on: February 10, 2009   Last Updated: February 11, 2009

Old paper cookbooks are certainly becoming a thing of the past.

Many cooks are turning to the convenience of the web while still others are turning to eBooks for recipes. These are the easiest, and most eco friendly ways to store the recipes that work for you and your family. How many trees do online recipes save?

Being a sentimentalist myself, I have some of my family's old cookbooks. I pull them out occasionally to look at and admire. Honestly, some of them are so old that I don't even know how to interpret them into items actually found in a grocery store today. For those, the paper has yellowed; the edges have been dog eared for so long the corners are gone.

I find myself wondering how full of germs they must be. I know they've been lying on the kitchen counters of my grandmother and great-grandmother, and then my mother. They have oil and other food stains on them from a century ago. I will keep them anyway.

Eventually, I see computers made for the kitchen with databases you can plug in some ingredients and it will locate recipes that match. They will be waterproof, of course. It probably won't be as bulky as laptops are now; it may even read' the recipes to you as you go. It will likely hold ten thousand's of recipes. But technology is moving so fast it may not be so far off.

Enough of the Jetson's futuristic stuff, paper cookbooks could not possibly be very clean. They get wet and stained, the pages wrinkle, the ink blurs. They take up valuable space in your home and collect dust. How many recipes do you actually use from those old cookbooks? Is keeping all those pages worth the five or ten recipes you actually use from each book? Even newer cookbooks can't hold up forever.

I am an avid cook and I believe people who love to cook will play with food and create something, only using a recipe as a starter. When I look through recipes online I don't print or follow them exactly. Just about everything I make in the kitchen is my own creation.

Cookbooks and the recipes of others are nothing more than idea books for me.

Eventually, all written paper books will be extinct. We will save trees, avoid dust and clutter. In these economic times, who can afford to go buy a cookbook anyway? Look up ideas for your kitchen online and save the money for the grocery store. We all need the extra money there.

I have written two cookbooks and have sold many copies. The books are available in print and online. My online cookbooks (ebooks) have sold more. They've sold more, about four to one actually. I know I don't stand alone on my opinion on this topic, as I have witnessed the sales myself.

Cookbooks had their heyday, but unfortunately, I believe they are a thing of the past. New ways of doing things, better ways, are coming whether we like it or not. We may as well embrace these changes. I will always like books, but we also need to consider what the paper books are doing to our environment. We need trees for more than just paper!

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