Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
First of all, Seriously?
I think all of these Weber barbecuing books are written by one author, Jamie Purviance, and they look like they all started as print books sold by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and most, if not all have the ebook edition by HMH as well. My guess is that HMH is paying Weber for use of their trademark, and not the other way around. Certainly the existence of these BBQ books are unlikely to have an appreciable effect on the Weber grill sales. They're accessories. I could see if Weber wasn't the name in American grills, and they were to be publishing pamphlets with a dozen or so recipes highlighting their grills, I would expect them to be free. But these books are not that. They've each got at least 100 recipes, 150 or more print pages with lots of photographs. IMHO, $1.99 is a pretty good price.
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Seriously.
You may have analyzed the nature of their (Weber grills and "Weber" cookbooks) relationship better than I.
You described a situation where a publisher evidently pays for the right to use the (popular!) name of "Weber." I was traveling back, in my mind, to the situation in the early days of "consumer" microwave ovens.
The first microwave oven that I owned was in about 1985 or 1986 (ones in, say, breakrooms of
businesses, came along in about the mid-1960's).
Individuals knew that they couldn't really cook meals with them, at least not in the same way that they did with conventional ovens! So, "all" of the consumer microwave companies threw in, with their ovens (and maybe paid a licensing fee for!), a "microwave cookbook," usually from a popular cookbook publisher like Betty Crocker.
In that situation, the manufacturers of the microwave machines used the brand names of the cookbook to try to sell the machine to customers. After reading your post and thinking about it, I believe that the situation between Weber and "Weber" cookbooks is just the opposite--Weber cookbooks use the name of the (popular) Weber grill to bring greater prestige to their cookbooks!
In short, I think that you are right.