Digital cookbook maker: a recipe fits one spread

You are cooking with the phone propped against the flour bag, two feet away, hands wet. Step three says add the butter, so you scroll up for the quantity, then scroll back and lose your place in the method. Print solved that by keeping both on one open spread, and a flipbook is the digital format that leaves the spread intact.

A recipe that fits one spread survives the kitchen

The scrolling is the whole problem. A fixed spread has nothing to scroll: ingredients on the left page, method on the right, both readable from arm's length, and the layout does not reflow when the screen dims and relocks. Defend that constraint, because the moment a recipe runs onto a third page the cook is turning pages with butter on a thumb.

• Never split a recipe: if it does not fit the spread, cut words rather than add a page.
• Ingredients in use order: cooks work straight down the list, so grouping by type sends them hunting.
• Yield, time and oven temperature at the top: those three decide whether the cook commits at all.
• 12pt or larger at final page size: this gets read from further away than a book, in worse light, and flour shows less on a dark background than a white one.

Grams first keeps a bake from failing abroad

Cups measure volume and grams measure mass, and the gap is widest for flour, sugar and butter, the three ingredients that decide whether a bake works. If anyone outside your country will read the book, give both: grams first, cups in brackets, one extra line per ingredient. Do the same for the oven in C and F, and say whether the number assumes fan.

The other failure is names, not numbers. Coriander leaf and coriander seed come off one plant and do two different jobs, so a cook who grabs the wrong one has made a different dish. Aubergine and eggplant are one vegetable with two names. Spell out whichever your reader would not guess and nobody has to write in and ask.

Three videos in the right places beat thirty

Most steps are fine in words. Two or three per book are not, and they are always the same ones: folding, kneading to texture, tempering, spatchcocking. Put a hotspot on that step and point it at the clip. The tap opens the video in a new tab and the reader comes back to the same spread, on the same recipe. Hotspots also carry tooltips and modals, so a substitution note can sit on the ingredient instead of eating a line of the layout. The finished-dish photo is the element everyone taps anyway, which is where a shopping list or a wine pairing belongs.

Forty recipes is a book, a hundred is a website

Twenty to forty recipes reads as a book. It has a shape, a contents page and chapters a cook can flip to. Past about forty, readers stop flipping and start wanting a search box, and a search box is a website. Group by course, season or occasion, and put the contents page in, because someone who wants the pasta chapter should not pass eleven desserts to reach it. A hundred recipes is two books.

The link is the product, the payment happens elsewhere

There is no checkout inside i3Dify, so selling a cookbook means gating the URL somewhere that takes money. Buyers pay on Gumroad or Ko-fi, you deliver the link, and one chapter sits at a public URL as the sample. For a family book, password-protect it and leave the URL unlisted instead. Downloads are off by default, so a reader can save the pages as a PDF only if you turn that switch on. The free plan holds 3 projects and 50 MB, and every page carries the i3Dify watermark. Pro is 3 dollars a month and removes the branding, which starts to matter the day you charge for the book.

A cookbook that keeps the ingredients and the method on one spread is the one that gets cooked from, splashed, and asked about. The rest is forty recipes and a contents page.

Start from the cookbook template.