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March 24, 2026

Why the Cookbook Endures

By: Shaan Merchant

Not too long ago, the physical cookbook seemed to be heading toward the same fate as the compact disc. What happened was just the opposite.

In October 2011, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking became available in a buzzy new format: the e-book. The release was years in the making, the New York Times reported, with Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who originally acquired the iconic book, insisting on keeping the original two-column format, requiring the production staff to type the entire book by hand to create this digital reproduction.

In an article titled “Cookbook Revolution,” the Chicago Tribune’s Jennifer Day wrote that there was “no need to page through the book searching for cross-referenced recipes; just touch the text, and let your e-book reader find it for you.”

Writing in a column for Slate the following year, L. V. Anderson confidently predicted that the extinction of cookbooks was nigh. “I’m not only certain of the imminent demise of the print cookbook—I’m fine with it. That’s because print cookbooks offer nothing that apps, e-books, and websites can’t, despite print enthusiasts’ efforts to recast them as objets d’art.”

In her flame-throwing piece, Anderson made an “anything you can do I can do better”–style argument, focusing on quality of recipes, readability, and aesthetics—and arguing that each already was or would soon be improved on e-readers, websites, and apps. Fifteen years later, the cookbook is very much alive, despite the premature obituaries. In fact, it’s thriving.

Book Larder in Seattle. Top: Kitchen Arts and Letters in New York City.

Since Anderson’s confident—and at the time hardly radical—prediction, cookbook sales have grown 8 percent year over year from 2010 to 2020, according to point-of-sale data tracking service BookScan, with the growth driven largely by physical books. The COVID-19 pandemic created significant bumps in sales. In 2025, baking book sales were up 80 percent over the year prior, despite an ever-growing list of alternatives for recipes and recipe-adjacent content. Cookbooks continue to sell.

How did this happen? Faced with what looked like an existential threat, publishers did not retreat from print. Instead they leaned into what the digital world couldn’t replicate: the tactile pleasure of a beautiful object, a cohesive world of recipes and stories, and the trust that comes from careful testing and editing.

“I remember that so clearly. It was a key moment,” Jennifer Sit, editorial director at Clarkson Potter, says of that turn-of-the-decade panic around the impact of e-books. “What we did is really double down on the quality and the production values of books. Our books are ones that you really want to own and have as a physical object—a beautiful thing that you want in your home—that also is full of great recipes, of course.”

It turns out that the physical cookbook is something that simply couldn’t be represented in e-ink. “The design, the photography, the writing, the paper, the size of the book, the production—it all comes together to create an object where each book is a world you step into,” Sit says. “What drives me as an editor is that each cookbook is a world that we create together.” (TASTE is part of the Crown Publishing Group, home to Clarkson Potter, although it is editorially independent.)

“You may never cook a recipe from that book on your coffee table, but it’s a marker of participation in a conversation about food, about culture and what you subscribe to.”

Building these designed worlds isn’t just a way to differentiate physical books from e-books. Aesthetics have become especially important in this social media age, when visuals are tied to personality and brand.

“We’re all on our phones, looking at TikTok and Instagram and digesting things visually. Cookbooks have followed that,” says Melanie Tortoroli, an executive editor and vice president at W. W. Norton. “We spend more time than ever thinking about the look of a book: the colors, the photography, the styling, what plates to use, which backgrounds to set up, what kind of a scene we want to create for the reader.”

Sit echoes this sentiment: “Audiences have increasingly desired more visual content,” she explains, adding, “Most of our cookbooks have an accompanying photo for every recipe, and sometimes process shots and QR code links to supportive video content for techniques.”

Sally Ekus is a senior literary agent at Jean V. Naggar...