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 The QOOQ tablet is the first tablet designed for and marketed towards serious chefs and foodies for whom cooking is not just a lifestyle but a skill that you attack like you are training for a UFC Cage Fight. This dedicated tablet is designed to be Kitchen proof with durable moist proof screen that can be wiped with soap and water and used with wet hands. The tablet lays slightly off the ground on legs so it remains above any spills.

But the main thing that makes this device the future of digital publishing is not the functional ergonomic Linux-based tablet, running on a 1 GHz ARM Cortex A9 dual-core processor with a 10.1” mineral glass touchscreen that features LED backlighting. Rather it is the QOOQ content that is accessed online by subscription.

The site silos 3,500 interactive recipes, 250 technique videos, 450 ingredient pages, and 500 wine pages contributed by over 100 chefs. Part recipe aggregator, part magazine, part TV channel and part lifestyle app this is a very interesting experiment in siloing and may be a preview of what the digital publishing ecosystem will look like in the near future. Add social networking and downloadable ebooks for long form reading and as a foodista why og anywhere else? Rather than search for content from big box digital retailers (Amazon and iBookstore) people will pull content from targeted channels that will deliver multiple formats of media from text to video to interactive apps all tailored to you needs, skill level and interests based on you profile preferences. This type of content distribution I think will be particularly effective for non fiction/educational oriented subjects like cooking, crafts, history, sports, etc but also applicable to genre publishing such as romance, mystery and science fiction & fantasy.

In a digital world publishers need to begin thinking about their content as a vast pool of content to be accessed in ways beyond the artificial structure of a printed book. When people say “the app is dead” this is what they mean. With fast steaming access to the internet rather than focusing on individual media formats we should begin as publishers focusing on content and the ability to deliver it in the format appropriate for the task from a single respected subject silo that draws a social community of like minded users looking to participate in a lifestyle. The Digital future is about information delivery not “product” delivery.