I wish to create a recipe cookbook on my mac. there are no apps. can this be done another way?

If you mean an app for OS X to be used for storing and printing kitchen recipes, one option is MacGourmet. The standard version is $20, and the Deluxe version is $35.

This site lists a bunch of different Mac compatible software with ratings.

I agree, partially, with Barney that you will have to find a small print shop or quick print/copy shop or some Office supply retailers that offer quick printing to see what is available to bind your printed pages together to form a book or booklet.

Most of these quick print/copy places will NOT have the methods to do traditional glue bound and glue and stitch bound books as you maybe accustomed to, in a traditional book sense.

A small print shop maybe able to to a small quantity run of traditionally bound books (say mimimum 100 books), but you will have to ask what the small print shop will run for a minimum quantity.

You will have to use paid apps to do the layout work and you need to ask all of the print places what file formats they prefer or use and what programs they can deal wiith.

If if you want to forego any type of "traditional printing", copy shop page copying can be done instead wiith a quality level that can rival actual printed page copies.

Instead of printing pages, if you use the common copy machine methods, you can use any decent (paid) page layout application, print the pages out yourself on your own quality home printer, bring your printed out pages to a quick copy shop and have them properly copy, layout, collate and bind your recipe pages in the correct order to assemble it into book or booklet form.

Most copy places can copy onto quality paper stock, they will have heavyweight paper stock suitable for front and back covers and in any colors available that you can choose from.

Creating copies will be cheaper and there shouldn't be any minimum quantity of books or booklets to worry about.

If you just use the quick print shop page copying methods, the cheapest paid applications to create this cookbook are,

From the Mac App Store.

Apple Pages $9.99 U.S.D.

OR

BeLight software Swift Publisher $19.99 U.S.D.

( for page layout)

PIxelmator $14.99 U.S.D.

( for image editing and creation)

Ususlly, the books from these types of sites are, relatively, expensive.

I was going to suggest Shutterfly.com except there mimumum price per book is $30 and can go higher than this depending on the size and format of the created book.

I did two copies of a custom sized hard bound book that was only 25 pages through Shutterfly and was charged $50 per book.

Are Blurb.com custom created books any cheaper?

Based on your other responses, I should note that Mac Gourmet, and the site I linked to with the variety of similar apps are for creating recipe cards, or recipes printed out on letter size paper to put in a binder. None of them are meant for creating an actual book layout. For that, you need a page layout app such as InDesign, Quark XPress, Pages, iStudio Publisher, the free open source Scribus, etc.

Here's one page rating such software. Press and prepress shops will be much happier with you if you use InDesign or Quark XPress. Neither of which qualify as cheap software. Page layout software is only vaguely similar to a word processor, so the learning curve can be rather steep.

That is why I was trying to steer the OP into using a quick copy shop instead.

If the OP has a fairly good quality printer or purchases a good quality printer, the OP can use much cheaper page layout apps and have the finished pages be printed on a good quality home printer on cheaper paper, bring the pages to quick print/copy soho and have the pages printed on better paper stockon the newer,more high tech color print copiers.

The quality of today's color copiers is very good.

Tthe cons are that the book may or may not be able to be bound in a traditional book binding with thick book-style covers.

OT,

Great idea, but

DId you read the whole post?

The OP needs to make at least 25 copies or so.

Doesn't Apple charge a lot, too, for one of their bound photo books?

The OP appears to be looking for as cheap a way to accomplish this.

I am trying to suggest cheaper ways to get a good quality results while keeping the total cost down as much as possible.

Printing 25 books through Apple or any other online photo service that offer hard bound photo books maybe prohibitively and maybe unnecessarily costly to the OP.

That is why I was trying to steer the OP into using a quick copy shop instead.

Yup, and it's a very good idea. But when the OP came back and noted looking into Mac Gourmet, I wanted to make sure they understood it's not a page layout app.

If you wish to only create a small, limited quantity of books, I will re-emphasize that Old Toad's idea of using iPhoto to create the book is the easiest method to do so.

This offers a less steep learning curve and gives you a professional result with the least amount of effort.

If you are running OS X 10.9.x Mavericks, you would need to upgrade your current version of iPhoto to the latest version.

Creating the cookbook in iPhoto offers you the easiest way to create a small quantity of high quality books.

If you decide to go any other methods, the learning curve time and effort goes up and could be more of complication to you.

If you find/ use a small, but high quality professional printer to print your cookbook, the software tools will be a lot more complicated to learn and use. Adobe apps are subscription only and you'll pay a monthly subscription cost while you are learning to use this software. Quark Xpress is another very expensive page layout app that professional print shops and graphics gurus use.

This makes the whole creation of your cookbook just a massive undertaking at this stage.

If you have no familiarity with graphic design/creation and layout,

Forget about creating a book in this manner.

I would advise the use of iPhoto to create the book and use Apple's book services to print and create the books for you at whatever price points they offer, OR use one of the cheap page layout programs, they will be easier and quicker to learn and offer predesigned templates to work with, print all the pages of the cookbook out on a good quality home printer and go to a quick print/color copier print out method as I outlined in previous replies.

Both these methods yield the least paths of resistance to the final cookbook product you are trying to create.

Good Luck!

You could use iPhoto to create a small, wire bound book, with a photo of the dish on one page and the receipe on the facing page. The medium wire bound books are 6" x 8" in size.

OT

In an iPhoto book click on the Change Themes button in the All Pages view. At the top of the window will be this selection:

At the bottom left of the window will be the book info:

You might try iBooks and iBooks Author.

http://www.apple.com/uk/support/mac-apps/ibooksauthor/