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Indian Vegan 300 + Recipes Cookbook: member book reviews

(1 review)

I purchased the Kindle edition of this book because it was inexpensive and promised hundreds of vegan Indian recipes. I was disappointed. Though some of the recipes are probably quite tasty, this book has larger problems.

The book opens with disclaimers. One claims that the recipes are "believed to be in public domain" and are, therefore, not copyrighted. It states they were "gathered from all over the net." In other words, the "author" didn't develop or write these recipes; instead, she took them from others by way of the Internet. As I looked through the recipes, I found one that I've made many times. The recipe listed as "Eggplant and Potato (Indian)" is actually "Neela's Eggplant and Potato" from Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking, published by Knopf in 1981. So much for public domain.

A second problem with the book is that not all of the recipes are vegan. Many list butter and other dairy products as ingredients. They're easy to replace, but a book that claims to be vegan should only include vegan ingredients.

If possible copyright infringement and false advertising aren't enough to discourage you from purchasing this book, there's more. To say that it's poorly organized would be an understatement; it's not organized at all. It opens with the disclaimers and goes straight to a list of the recipes. The list is in no apparent order, and the formatting of the entire eBook is atrocious.

ETA: I returned the eBook to Amazon.com for a refund and told them about my concerns.

(edited 11th December 2011) report

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