Breads Cookbook Near-Miss!

Stopped at Chapters/Indigo on the way home from my ASL class tonight (which is why taking the bus never saves us any money!) and spent some time dithering over these two bread books:
 
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking
 
and
 
Baking Artisan Bread: 10 Expert Formulas for Baking Better Bread at Home
 
 
In the end, I decided to buy neither book. 
 
They were $30 each and might make a nice gift item, but I decided they weren't essential at the present time.
 
There are a lot of similarities:  both present a formula-based approach that uses a few basic dough recipes to create a huge range of breads. 
 
I loved the illustrations in Artisan Bread, which show some important details like the consistency of the dough, though I wished they could have been higher-quality (they're basic black and white).  I also like its approach, which is reassuring and not too slick - it really seems well-suited to the humble home baker, without demanding a lot of special equipment or ingredients.  However, I found that it also included too many recipes for things that are not bread (salads and tuna and whatnot to go with bread). 
 
Baking Artisan Bread sticks mostly to breads and bready things, and the illustrations are full-colour and very slick.  It also includes a DVD, which I couldn't preview obviously, and the DVD may make the whole thing worthwhile, ultimately.  But my decision was based, partly, on the fact that it is not a very thick book.  You really only get a few recipes you can actually use.  I may revisit it, however, if it seems that reviewers have said that the DVD is very helpful.
 
I did buy an ASL dictionary (The Pocket Dictionary Of Signing (Perigee) ) to replace the pocket-sized one that got lost three weeks ago (Random House Webster's Pocket American Sign Language Dictionary - purse-sized and ever so cool!).  It's not as good as the missing one, but I don't want to end up with two copies of the same dictionary!

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