A controversy is simmering in an unlikely corner of the media: the apparently cutthroat world of recipe books. Men’s Health Editor David Zinczenko is calling out Rocco DiSpirito over his Now Eat This! book, which Zinczenko says borrows too heavily from his long running Eat This, Not That! series of cookbooks. “If imitation were the sincerest form of flattery,” he contended in the otherwise serene pages of Publishers Weekly, “I’d be bursting my buttons.”

It’s very easy to be skeptical of all the media lanscape-changing hype surrounding the iPad — in fact, we have not been immune to some classic cynicism ourselves. But we just had a fairly comprehensive walk-through of the Men’s Health iPad application, and consider us converted. We have found media’s future religion and thy name is iPad. A more complete write up is forth coming, but consider the following first reaction.

Men’s Health is providing Mediaite with further clarification about the way they choose cover lines following our post on the similarities between the newsstand cover of their December 2009 issue and their October 2007 issue, which were first pointed out by Perez Hilton.Men’s Health editor-in-chief David Zinczenko has passed along a number of the magazine’s subscription covers, which he says make up nearly 80 percent of their distribution versus the 20 percent comprised by newsstand covers like the ones Hilton discovered:

People who memorize every cover of Men’s Health may have noticed something curious about the December issue’s cover, aside from noted dreamboat Taylor Lautner: almost all of the text and layout is identical to a cover from 2007, which featured Jason Statham. The self-recycling was noted by none other than intrepid media watchdog … Perez Hilton. In a statement to Mediaite, Men’s Health editor-in-chief Dave Zinczenko defends the cover:

After a successful partnership with the NBC show The Biggest Loser, Prevention magazine will now link itself to CBS talk show The Doctors, in a savvy, increasingly viable model of cross-promotion. According to a report from Mediaweek, the multi-level deal comes with appearances on the show by editor-in-chief Liz Vaccariello, in addition to ads both online and in print.

A friend waits in a doctor’s office and notices that everyone around him is tap-tap-tapping away at their iPhone and completely ignoring the table full of magazines. This scene is a nightmare for magazine editors who are ever-worried about remaining relevant and somehow carving out a digital presence for themselves online and increasingly in our pockets. But unfortunately for them iPhone apps do not relevance (nor money!) make. At least not yet.