They really enshittified the internet so hard that it’s more convenient to have these bulky ass (expensive too if you don’t get second hand…) books that you have to flick through and find room to store and try not to spill shit on and stick little bookmarks in to save commonly used recipe, god damn.
For years I used a search engine, and used Pinterest a lot too to save recipes and categorise them. But the SEO slop, the AI slop, the ads…. It’s just become horrific half the time. I did try downloading a few eBooks and pdfs but the format is really not great for cookbooks.
If anyone has any recommendations for sites or apps that aren’t fucking terrible I would love that. Especially 
ones.
the internet has tons of info, but to make it useful it has to be curated. and frankly, electronic gadgets kinda suck to read/interact with in the kitchen. wet hands, sticky hands, etc. i had a bunch of recipes bookmarked and saved from online.
i have some physical books that i like, but they only made me realize the value in a well curated reference sheet. i ordered these like heavy duty “sheet protectors” and started monkeying around with creating single page reference charts for ratios in common components, then sort of synthesizing master recipies of certain staples into a similar format with optional variations. getting in to making bread got me into wanting to do everything by weight, so that drove me to convert things into showing weights.
the other cool thing about making your own reference materials is you can lay it out in a way that tells you what you need to know quickly. like i would color code the ingredient list into sections for different stages. (everything in red first, cook down for 5+ minutes, then add in yellow cover and stir occaisionally for x minutes, add green at the end before serving.)
660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer is a cool book… like an interesting read, but also a nice reference.
yeah this is the way as someone whose mother loves to cook and had a bunch of 50+ yo cookbooks with like two+ generations of scribbles/corrections/sauce stains/etc that were falling apart. we took all the cookbooks and photographed the pages & went through the effort to transcribe the various corrections, etc and just printed out doublesided paper copies that we laminated and stuck in a binder. way easier to flip through, no real worries about getting flour/oil/sauce/etc on the pages. can be easily fixed and added to.