Cookbooks taking up space? How many volumes of culinary instruction have you gathered over the years . . . Dozens? Hundreds?
One collection, New York University’s Fales Library Food Studies Collection has around fifty-five thousand!
Whether you have a few favorite cookbooks or a few dozen, isn’t it great to have all of your recipes and kitchen wisdom right at your fingertips everywhere you go? – Not so long ago this wasn’t possible.
If you don’t already know, your computer-savvy friends will tell you, that USB storage devices, sometimes called “thumb drives” or “flash drives”, can make it possible to fit more cookbooks in the palm of your hand than you could realistically collect over the course of a lifetime.
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The average eBook, complete with a multitude of color illustrations is estimated to be from 3 to 4 megabytes in file size. Assuming every food preparation manual you could obtain in electronic form was actually larger than average (5 megabytes in size), an 8-gigabyte USB flash drive will easily hold 1,638 cookbooks!
A 16-gigabyte drive will hold 3,276 and a 32-gig drive? A whopping 6,553 volumes. ( As of this writing, the highest capacity and currently most popular eBook reader will “only” store 3,500.)
Imagine, not only being able to gather that many cookbooks in the first place but having to put them all somewhere as actual bound paper. If each and every one of those books were only one inch thick in their non-digital printed form, you would need a shelf ( a very STRONG shelf ) that spanned 546 feet, or a spot to stack them all in that is roughly 54 stories tall.
So . . . A fully stocked cookbook library that used to require several rooms to itself will now fit in a pocket, purse, glove compartment, salt shaker, or snapped onto a charm bracelet. And it’s all thanks to a handy little gizmo with no moving parts that cost around twenty dollars (for 32 gig).
Now imagine actually having the time to read a collection that vast and try out all the recipes!
