Review: Nothing Unique, Extremely Amateur Production
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 1, 2012
Grandma was very excited to seeGood Eating's Best of the Best: Great Recipes of the Past Decade from the Chicago Tribune Test Kitchen- until she opened the cover.The single most basic requirement for any cookbook is the ability to find the recipe that you want quickly and easily when you want it.  This is something that all too many Kindle cookbook authors forget and the editors who assembled this book are no exception to that.  Instead of presenting all of the recipes in an individual link in a Table of Contents that correctly interfaces with the Kindle Navigation Menu, they have chosen to present only sections - Starters, Meat, Poultry, etc. - with a further Table of Contents at the beginning of each section. Since no single section contains more than a dozen recipes and most far fewer, this is entirely unnecessary.  All it does is make things harder to find for the user.  There is an index in the very back of the book, but very few Kindles include such a thing and no one would ever think to look for it, even if there was an easy link to get there.The book layout isn't horrible, but it could be better.  Many full-color pictures most Kindle users will not be able to see anyway have been included, increasing the file size greatly.  Most of the time those pictures are just enough too big that they end up introducing spare blank pages and lots of extra white space.  Only rarely do the pictures appear on the same page as the title of the recipe that they represent.  To be honest, Grandma is more than a little bit surprised that quite obviously the designer didn't bother to spring for a $79 Kindle in order to look at the book as readers would see it.The recipes are fine.  Many of them are quite good.  Unfortunately, they are also no longer even remotely timely.  Each and every one of these recipes is available on the Chicago Tribune website and most of them are also available from other newspapers as well as sites like FOOD, Taste of Home and CDKitchen.  Macaroni & Cheese with Bacon and Tomato, for example, was added to FOOD on November 5, 2002.  Chicken Penne with Tomato-garlic Cream Sauce can be obtained from almost too many websites to count, including CDKitchen and the Hartford Courant.  Even one of the least popular recipes in the book - Goat Cheese Ravioli with Sage and Brown Butter - is available on three different websites.All in all, this is, quite frankly, a rather amateurish effort.  Grandma has seen better & much more functional Kindle cookbooks  from many an independent author with little publishing experience at a mere fraction of the price.  Leave this one on the shelf.Not recommended