Babble
In another instance of sucking the last drop of yolk from the egg of financial gain, an unexpected enterprise is creating a cookbook, and it's not Gwyneth Paltrow this time.
At the Open Mobile Summit in London last week, Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio Mobile's head of marketing and business development, announced that the popular and addictive game, Angry Birds, will soon be the subject of a family-oriented cookbook of mostly egg recipes.
The current franchise is doing pretty well for itself; what began as a quirky mobile game in 2009 quickly become a big deal across several media platforms, with versions for gaming systems, personal computers, cameos on television shows, placement in Microsoft Bing advertisements, and its own highly grossing line of merchandise.
Apparently, this is just the beginning, as Vesterbacka has big plans for Rovio to become a fully developed entertainment brand and even delve into the world of animation. Think Disney, but more cross. There has been no statement as to whether the Angry Birds' thieving pigs will be featured in a future cookbook but creating an appetite for "the other green meat" probably has its inherent flaws.
Rovio decided to self-publish the cookbook after discussions with traditional publishers went awry. "They offered to help us make the book, in exchange for 90 percent revenue share," Vesterbacka said. "It was a short discussion." The title will be self-published and likely distributed by Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, in book form and as an eBook app.
Among the Angry Birds enthusiasts who are on course to clock up 1.2 billion hours of usage in the U.S., I am curious to know how many will break from catapulting wingless birds at cleverly stationed green swine in an attempt to get back their stolen eggs. So they can cook them. I'm not saying a cookbook featuring only egg recipes is a bad idea, I'm just saying I had my last omelet in 1996.
