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Not to me it isn't.  I know it is usually done because it makes the title "catchier," but I can't stand it either.  I feel like it trivializes the skills of amazing female cooks and chefs, and seems to be a way more rarely used device for male chefs and cooks to go by "boy" in the title, regardless of catchiness.  (I feel like there is a Bobby Flay cookbook called "boy" and something, or other, but I can't think of other instances.)

personally I ignore the eye candy pix and scan the general layout of the recipes and the font size...if too crowded or too small, eh.

then I scan the ingredients list, looking for the stuff I already stock my kitchen with, if I start to see lots of ingredients I don't use because they are expensive and/or not easily obtainable than out it goes. 

I want a cookbook to be friendly and approachable. 

Could not agree with you more!! The only thing I would have to the list above and what makes me cringe is that a lot of recipes are too easy in some cookbooks... I don't really need a recipe to tell me that you can beat up some eggs and cheese and make a cheese omelet or grilled tomatoes on a toast :)

1. I hate overillustrated cookbooks. Landscapes, market pictures, and long narrative sequences are nearly always padding to justify a high price. There are a few exceptions that I like, e.g. Yotam Ottolenghi's books, but they are just that - exceptions.

Pictures of the author are even worse, esp. if they're just mugging for the camera. Really, who cares?

My sister gave me a big overillustrated book and I exchanged it for a cookbook with no illustrations at all. In my unsentimental opinion, a cookbook is an instruction manual. That's not to distract from the pleasure - I also read dictionaries and look at atlases for pleasure. And I read with my taste buds.

5. Badly designed books - that's one of my top peeves! If the book is hard to read when you're sitting in a chair, how much harder will it be when you're cooking! Another sin: putting page numbers near the spine rather than at the outer edge.

7. Depends on whether I have the earlier books, and whether the earlier books are in print or out of print.

Point about photos of finished dishes is well taken. Nevertheless for me there is a line between illustration and overillustration, and between merely annoying and deal-breakingly obnoxious.

I don't mind a picture of the author on the cover, front or back. What I hate are: 1) pictures of the author inside the book, just for their own sake, and 2) a picture of the author on the spine, where it stares back at you even when the book is on the shelf.

Another deal-breaker is a horrid title. I don't mean what ae.bell considers a horrid title on the thread on underrated cookbooks - they're all fine to me. What I mean by a horrid title I'll explain in my next post.

angrygreycat - for books that deliver more than they promise on the topic of one pan meals...take a look at Molly Gilbert's One Pan and Done

Measurements given in cups is a complete no-no for me, as a British person we weigh everything and I find butter especially awkward to measure in cups.  We don't have butter in sticks like the Americans do.

When modern cookbooks only include ingredient measurements in cups and not in grams then I don't want the book.  I have collected hundreds of cookbooks and I avoid using the ones that don't include weight measurements.  Why would I want to add more to my library?  There are plenty of other cookbook options.

Being from the UK, I avoid books with cup measurements, I don't understand how they can be accurate.  

I also steer clear of the latest fads and anything by Gordon Ramsay!

In British cookbooks liquids are measured by volume but as ml not cups. You will still have some older measures such as teaspoons (5ml), dessertspoons (10ml) and tablespoons (15ml) but generally you will see all dry goods in grams and liquids in mls.

...oh, and where oven temperatures are not given in centigrade and there is no temperature given for fan ovens.  This can also put me off US cookbooks. 

I'm with you Pamsy .. cannot abide recipes that use cup measurements.. and regretably seems American and Oz books suffer from that style! Was delighted to read Shirley Corriher's discussion of same in "Bakewise" .....! I always end up writing in the accurate measurement (ie: weight/volume ) as marginal notes... Why do they do it .. surely we've come a long way since the days when the only way to achieve consistency was a cup.. the Avoir dupois weight/measurement system was after all around from 13th century , and standardised in 1959! That said, buying a new book or magazine for me requires clear recipes.. on a single page, ingredients listed with weights/volume, instructions dot pointed, and ideally a pic of the finished article,  without people!

"Girl" and "boy" don't bother me. Neither does the common noun "guy." If someone wants to call himself The Avocado Guy that's IMO typical marketing silliness.

But I promised to give an example of what I consider a deal-breakingly horrid title, so here it is:

The Mensch Chef: Why Delicious Jewish Cooking Isn't an Oxymoron. It's by Mitchell Davis.

For me that's cringeworthy on several levels. For one, the Yiddish word "mensch" (or "mensh") has nothing to do with being down to earth, or pleasant to be with. The word for that is "haimish." A mensch is a human being of the highest character, a person of honesty, integrity, compassion, courage, etc. As another poster said here, all kinds of people can be good cooks. How would you like "The Sterling Character Chef"?

Furthermore, "mensh" is a noun, and it will not do to use it as an adjective. The adjectival form IIRC is "menshlike," pronounced mensh-li-kuh.

And of course "delicious Jewish cooking" isn't an oxymoron. I can't imagine a statement in which it would be an oxymoron. An oxymoron is a deliberate device to describe something that is real in spite of the contradictory words. "Sweet sorrow" (Shakespeare). "Darkness visible" and "living death" (Milton). "Nose-holding charity" (Vonnegut).

Much as I'd love to have another good Jewish cookbook, I would cringe every time I saw this one, even if it had a recipe for the world's greatest kugel.

Another kind of title I hate is anything beginning "Not Your Mother's." That seems a deliberate appeal to the arrogance of youth. Why should I welcome such an appeal onto my bookshelves?