reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (03/23/86)
I just heard from a cookbook editor at a large U.S. publishing
firm (Crown). She told me this:
About 10 years ago we had "the great metric scare" in the
cookbook industry. Publishers believed that they were going to
have to go metric, as did food packers, and there was a rush of
activity to produce metric cookbooks for the U.S. audience.
Nobody bought them. Absolutely nobody. They just plain did not
sell. There are 75 million cooks in the U.S., and only a few
hundred thousand of them were willing to abandon intuitive
measurements for metric. Cookbooks are the third-largest
category of book sales in the U.S. (behind religious tracts and
bibles, and romance novels). During the Great Metric Scare the
sales of cookbooks fell to below 20th place.
The publishers took a horrible loss, sold the books to remainder
houses, and went back to the way they have always done it, which
sells. They have no intention whatsoever of trying metric
cookbooks again anytime soon.
--
Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid
Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA