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I second the posting of photos, but am the first to admit that mine are 1) as far from a food stylist as possible because I'm cooking my real food & documenting with my i phone, and 2) as a personal way to narrow down a search without getting too "boolean" in the main search area.

I am willing to forgive the discrepancy between recipe & cookbook photo at times or errors in the recipe itself, for example my favorite recipe Creamy Onion Tart with Olives in one of my favorite cookbooks, Repertoire: All the Recipes You Need by Jessica Battilana where according to my review at the time said the book photo looked like rosemary not thyme and if thyme were the intended herb, you wouldn't need to chop it up. Especially I often improvise wih cooking and knew from experience that I wanted to use thyme.

Re the photos, I appreciate Jane's patience with me & my photos, I have now at least learned how to reorient them before posting.

I also look for good writing and have discovered many authors I may not have found without EYB. I also choose cover design over US vs UK options, since I mainly cook, not bake so metric conversions are nbd. I freely admit I bought Nigel Slater's Ripe for the colors (reminded me of a favorite hotel room in a favorite city), then bought Tender as it's companion. 
As I buy new books and try to be selective, the last Nigel Slater book I bought, and likely to remain so, was Notes from the Larder. The fact this brand new book I wanted for its narrative, seasonal content, arrived direct from the publisher with the lettering not just 'a little imperfect' but with practically no readable title, combined with the complete lack of response from said publisher when I let them know of the poor condition, led me to tuck all 3 books where I would only see them if I chose (and I'm still obviously not over it, hence the rant). Perhaps I will find/search for a used copy if it is verifiably in better condition because I do really want to read it and own a hard copy someday.

I don't follow celebrities at all, so I'm mildly mortified that I have several celebrity cookbooks, but I do, including all three Chrissy Teigen books.  Obviously Adeena Sussman also works on them-- they seem to make a great team-- and there has never been anything in these books that my husband and family haven't liked.  They're up with Ina Garten and Deb Perelman in the "my peeps like this and the recipes never steer me wrong" category.  I'm more of a vegetarian cook myself, but I also cook for the family, obviously.  

Anyway, the latest Chrissy Teigen book is one I'm clearly buying for reliable and tasty recipe content, because everything about the design is "what I don't like in a cookbook." I like a pretty simple look that helps focus on the recipes.  I do enjoy photos of the food, but a simple font and layout is good-- I'm kind of distractible (ADHD, inattentive type).  So, this book.  Many of the pages are pale pink.  The title font on each page is really stylized and hard to read.  The photos are so colorful, including a mix of colors that are probably trendy together right now, but kind of loud and clashing and jarring.  There are lots of little hand-drawn cartoons that look like what I would have done in about middle school (or now, if I still drew cartoons) with my Pentel markers, and they're cute, but, just saying, there's a lot going on visually already, and on top of that, there are cartoons.  I'll be cooking from it and the pages are SO BUSY.  But what can I say-- the food is a hit, because it's delicious, and I guess that's the point.  :)

Chrissy Teigen's new book is on my wish list as we also really like her 1st 2 books...but having said that, if I wasn't familiar with her recipes, I would likely pass this one by in a bookstore simply based on the cover.  I don't like to be so quick to a superficial opinion but in this case - it's sad but true.

I don't know about celebrities either, so I had to Google Chrissy Teigen to see whether she's a celebrity cook or some other kind of celebrity. (For those as ignorant as I am, she's a model.)

A nice list of pros and cons. And the deciding factor is just what I would make it: does it help you cook good food.

Interestingly, she's a model who wrote a food blog because she's genuinely interested in food (not diet food, like you'd think), actually cooks, and she was encouraged by Francis Lam of The Splendid Table to write a cookbook.  Which is a pretty strong recommendation.  The food in her books is definitely comfort food done well, with a Thai influence from her mom (and a chicken pot pie influence from her dad).  She's all over Twitter (and is pretty sassy, and swears like a sailor), and she ticks off fans of Donald Trump, but I am not a fan of Donald Trump, so that's fine with me.  Like I said, I don't follow celebrities-- I just know about her because I finally gave in and bought her first cookbook and it was so good that I also bought the second and third.  :) 

I'm off topic here, so-- what would make me NOT buy a book:  I used to avoid celebrity cookbooks because, to be honest, I'm pretty academic and nerdy and was kind of snobby about them, but then I thought, why not if they're actually good?  :) So I have a few.  

I really dislike cookbooks that don't have photos for each recipe. I like to see the presentation!

And I'm so unlike that - when my sister gave me a cookbook that seemed more like a picture book than a recipe book, I exchanged it for a cookbook with no pictures at all.

Drom John, spouse of Shelmar, here.

#1 reason to keep Shelmar from buying a cookbook is checking LibraryThing to see if we already have it.

We often get duplicates when they are sold in lots at estate sales.

Our LibraryThing account has 624 more entries than EYB, mostly pre-ISBN and pamphlets.

Now, speaking for me, you can't judge a book by its cover. And some of our favorite books are celebrity cookbooks: children's book author Crescent Dragonwagon, film producer Ismail Merchant, mother of an actor Joan Tucci.

And tattoos! A favorite restaurant of mine, Gunshow, is Kevin Gillespie's; whose Fire in the Belly features fabulous tattoos on the cover.

By "pamphlets," I hope you're including those cookbooklets issued by food companies and industry groups. They seldom have ISBN's because they're considered privately printed.

I never knew that Crescent Dragonwagon was a nonculinary celebrity.

There's something about the mystique of celebrity cookbooks that makes it hard to find a parallel elsewhere. There's Favorite Recipes from Quilters, but I doubt there's Favorite Quilt Patterns from Cooks. But so many of us know (or are) home cooks who have concocted something tasty and original, and if we don't have relatives or friends who have done so, there are community cookbooks, member-supplied food sites, reader recipes in culinary magazines, social media, etc. Some of the recipes may be lifted from published works but probably not all of them are.

So it's not so far-fetched to think that a famous actor, or his agent, may have a recipe worth passing on. And with the recipe comes the cachet of the famous actor.

A whole bookload of recipes may have a heavier burden of proof.

Don't forget Vincent Price.  I really like his cookbook because of his narrative and recipes.  Such an interesting cookbook.  

Love Jr League, community cookbooks, and military wives' cookbooks.  

But Vincent and Mary Price weren't home cooks. They were recipe collectors. They dined at top-tier restaurants in many cities and asked for the recipes. I'm surprised so many chefs complied - after all, a restaurant is a business.

"I buy a lot of cookbooks, mostly used."

So anniette, do you have a lot of unindexed books on your bookshelf? (I have about half indexed, half unindexed.)

Judging by the number of ready meals in your average supermarket most people don't/won't even cook the basics let alone a restaurant quality meal that use hard to find, expensive quality ingredients with hard to master techniques and equipment. 

I don't generally buy restaurant focused cookbooks for this very reason.

What causes me to not buy a cookbook or use a recipe is very simple, I won't use a "recipe" that uses a cake mix as an ingredient.  To me this goes beyond cheating in a recipe  but I call it that when I speak to others about it to be polite. In reality seeing a recipe with a cake mix as an ingredient seriously makes my blood boil and my blood pressure to go up.  Put simply and politely,  it is nothing short of laziness on both the authors part and the person who makes the recipe. Many argue that this is a matter of convenience in today's greed driven society that is only interested in profit and money. I disagree it is laziness either way. If you have the time to put the egg, water and oil into the bowl along with the cake mix...you have the time to put in a few more ingredients such as baking powder or baking soda and the required flour for a non cake mix cake to be successful. If you don't want to make the real thing then do the ultimate lazy thing and visit your local bakery after all to use a cake mix at home is about 75 percent of the way to going to a bakery anyway.

Well, this hasn't stopped me from buying a few cookbooks like this, but if a book has that really garish, over saturated, loud-colored photography with strong artificial lighting, clashing colors, and a lot of busy detail in the background, I definitely have to REALLY want the recipes to buy it.  I think that kind of look is going to be really dated in a few years, but it's very "in" right now, clearly.  A good example would be the 3rd Chrissy Teigen cookbook which I mentioned above.  

I feel the same way about cookbooks with photos in which the chef-author does nothing but MUG for the camera.

Really, who does he think he is and how does that help me to be a better cook?

Recipes that use cup as a measurement. Give me grams. 

That doesn't deter me one bit. NOT ONE BIT.

What does deter me is seeing the print cookbooks at a real brick-and-mortar bookstore. I was stranded in a Barnes & Noble store the other day because of a storm warning. The cookbooks in the cookbook section were a bad case of collective elephantiasis.

Looking at Web pages, I can hardly appreciate the sheer size, glitz and WEIGHT of these cookbooks and the outsize proportion of razzle-dazzle to actual recipes and cooking advice.

OK, I saw one regional cookbook that caused me to shout with nostalgic joy, but the sheer emphasis on local history and scenery, with a few recipes stuck in, convinced me that I'd done well never to order this book. One of these days I'll delete it from my wishlist.

One of the few books to escape this judgment was the latest Joy of Cooking, which is informative enough to justify its bulk.

Totally agree - I won't buy a baking book with just cup measurements. Sadly I bought a few baking books on Kindle when I lived in North America before I realised that not all authors provide metric measurements too and not all conversions to metric are accurate.