I bought a Kindle Paperwhite at Christmas. I’ve looked at Kindles over the years and have considered getting one. I have some cookbooks in Kindle format that I’ve used my phone to view. And Amazon offered the Kindle on payments. So despite some doubts, I picked one up. It’s a decent device for the price. It’s lightweight and you can adjust the font. It works out pretty well for using a recipe while cooking.
But there has been something that I didn’t like about it and it finally dawned on me what that is. Books on the Kindle never age. You never find pictures or other items tucked in one. There’s no character to a book you read on the Kindle. I am someone that started reading at an early age and I have read a lot of books in my life. It’s just not as satisfying as a physical book. Plus you have to charge it and you have to rely on Amazon continuing to make the book accessible.
I don’t think I’ll get rid of it. I can always use it for cookbooks! I have started to shift focus towards buying hard bound copies of books I really love and getting rid of some of the old paperbacks that I haven’t read in years. I do not read as much now as I did when I was younger. I can buy for quality versus quantity. And who knows what I’ll find in that used book!
I love the convenience of being able to look up recipes on the internet, then print them out. You can find anything you can imagine: a rhubarb/apricot/pineapple dessert? It’s out there! But I cannot give up the habit of buying cookbooks, particularly OLD cookbooks. There’s something about them that I like in addition to whatever information they’re giving me. The pictures, the descriptive intros for recipes, even the fonts are attractive. I just like looking at them and reading them.
Absolutely! My favorite is the Searchlight, particularly the one from the WWII era. It’s funny you mentioned this today. My husband has his grandmother’s handwritten recipes. I’m making the fruit cocktail cake right now. He had it one time when he was a little boy. I hope it’s as good as he remembered.
I have a few of my mom’s handwritten recipes, too. I actually laminated them, to preserve them from getting stained or torn. Now they’re like recipe cards, and I can clip them to the fridge while I’m cooking, and it’s a bit of a connection to my mom at the same time.