By Chris McBride, Publisher, Alta Editions

Like a lot of people who enjoy cooking I have a cookbook collection that I love. Over the years I’ve filled my bookshelf with hundreds of cookbooks on a variety of topics ranging from Austrian cuisine to San Francisco’s beloved Zuni Café. Nestled among the classics and curiosities are chef-driven masterworks and epic compendiums. Some were gifts, but most were books I purchased because I was excited to read and cook from them.

How frequently do I pull any of these cookbooks off the shelf? Considering their value, not often enough. And I’m not alone. Most people I know only reference a handful of their cookbooks regularly, if at all. After the honeymoon phase when an exciting new cookbook is thoroughly leafed through and a few appealing dishes are chosen to cook and enjoy, most cookbooks go on to lead very lonely lives.

As all things print continue to migrate to digital, does this mean, as some have suggested, that print cookbooks are doomed to share the same fate as the eight-track? Not according to several leading cookbook publishers. Reports indicate that 2013 was a strong year for cookbook sales. San Francisco-based Chronicle Books even claimed that 2013 was one of its best years ever for cookbooks. Regrettably for publishers this continued success with print hasn’t yet translated to strong e-books sales.

The reasons might seem obvious. Paging through a beautifully designed cookbook dense with rich color photography is in many ways a superior experience to swiping through its Kindle or iBooks equivalent. A stack of well worn cookbooks near the kitchen lets you know you’re in the company of a serious cook. And as we’re reminded each holiday season print cookbooks make excellent gifts. For these and other often sentimental reasons it should come as no surprise that most book buyers continue to prefer print over e-book cookbooks.

From the 2013 Book Industry Study Group study, Consumer Attitudes Towards Ebook Reading

For their part the major e-book formats do have some advantages over print cookbooks—they’re easy to carry around, they don’t take up shelf space and they’re searchable—but they also suffer from limitations. Dedicated e-readers like the Kindle Paperwhite are lousy kitchen companions and most Kindle Fire and Apple iBooks cookbooks look like PDF versions of the printed page. Most often they fail to take full advantage of the digital format, lacking interactive tips, step by step photos, video tutorials, and many other conveniences we take for granted on recipe websites, like browsing and searching for recipes across a collection. They’re also either literally or practically unusable on mobile.

So it should come as no surprise that nearly all cooks these days, both casual and serious, look to the internet for recipes and cooking instruction. The sheer convenience of having countless free recipes (many in fact cribbed from cookbooks) available on your computer, tablet and mobile phone is hard to compete with.