“But a Nook can’t read, so a Nook can’t cook. So…what good to a Nook is a hook cook book?”
–One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Dr. Seuss

I’m sure that’s not what Barnes & Noble had in mind when they named their e-reader.

A recent article in the New York Times asks if cookbooks are obsolete (leading question much?). It describes how a number of wonderful apps are sweeping traditional cookbooks and recipe cards off the kitchen counter and back onto their shelves to gather dust.

As usual, there is plenty of room for both sides. Certainly, some people will gravitate toward these apps and e-versions of cookbooks on tablets or e-reader devices, either replacing or enhancing their print cookbooks; others will ignore the new toys (audio, video, flowcharts, built-in timers and glossaries) and continue using their print books.

There’s also a middle ground: Eat Your Books offers a way to search through all the indexes of all your cookbooks for a particular recipe. The recipes themselves can’t be accessed through the site unless they are free online, but by searching the indexes of all the books you already own, you can find what you’re looking for much more easily; it’s a way of semi-digitizing your cookbooks. You can also add blogs such as Chocolate & Zucchini and Smitten Kitchen to your “shelves” and search those too.

Incidentally, the NYT article neglects to mention what would happen if one were to spill soup onto one’s iPad.

Right below the Nobel article in Salon, there was an article about hypertext novels, titled “Why the Book’s Future Never Happened,” Hypertext fiction, according to Wikipedia, is electronic literature with hyperlinks that allow for non-linearity and reader interaction. (Not having read one, the impression that I get is something between a choose-your-own adventure novel and a novel told in a non-linear fashion, e.g. with flashbacks or different character perspectives.)

Apparently there was a lot of hype about hypertext fiction back in the ’90s – it was supposed to be “the next big thing,” but it never really took off. The author of the Salon article posits that hypertext fiction was “born into a world that wasn’t quite ready for it,” and additionally, its failure had more to do with its content than with the its format. That is, the first hypertext novels simply weren’t very good. (“True, the hypertext offers you the puzzle-solving pleasure of making sense of the story, arranging the pieces in your head to see the whole mosaic, but why would you do that, if the pieces don’t suggest a picture you care to see? Not every puzzle has an interesting solution.”)

The article’s author suggests that hypertext novels are even more difficult to write than regular novels, because “the sections have to be readable along multiple paths; they have to be richly related in multiple ways; and they have to keep you reading.” However, non-linear fiction has been written before: the author offers Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and and Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar as examples, and I might add to that: The Time Traveler’s Wife?