Great article in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail about how useful a scale is in the kitchen. Especially interesting to us cookbookers is this part on page 2 (and it applies to American cookbooks too):
"Kitchen scales are the dirty secret of Canadian recipe publishing. Everybody in the business knows that weight measures are superior. And yet not a single major Canadian food publication (The Globe and Mail as well) uses them outside of meat, poultry and some vegetables – ingredients that are sold by weight. “Volume measurement is just how Canadian cooks cook,” Ms. Shneer said. Translation: They don’t think we’re ready for it."
I was pleased to find both imperial and metric measurements in Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Every Day, published earlier this year, and the current challenge author, Rose Levy Beranbaum, has always included precise weights with her recipes, but I wouldn't be surprised if they both had to browbeat their publishers into accepting this!