Few people source their recipes from just one place. We're spoilt for choice these days with great cookbooks, enticing magazines, those wonderful recipes friends pass on to us, and who hasn't seen a recipe on a website that they'd love to cook one day. Keeping track of all your recipes from all these sources is now possible - you can have them all on your EYB Bookshelf.

We have just launched the EYB Bookmarket, which will help you organize and find online recipes. You'll find it on your Home page and it's a very simple process to install it on your Favorites Toolbar. Just drag and drop it!

The Bookmarklet is on your Home page - this is just an image and won't work!

Once installed you click on it every time you see a recipe that you'd like to add to your Bookshelf. An indexing form will pop up for you to complete. Once saved, the Recipe will be added to your Bookshelf and the EYB Library for other members to access

We bring across as much information as we can, including an image if possible. Every website has different formats, so this varies from one to another.

The more complete and accurate you are with your indexing the more useful it is to you and other members. For more information see How do I add a Recipe from a food website to my Bookshelf?

*  We do exclude links to recipe aggregator sites; sites accessed only through membership and home cook recipes sites.  If you're not able to add a recipe from one of these sites, using the Bookmarklet, you can still add details of the recipe using the Personal Recipes feature.

At the end of every year the lists of Top or Best or Favorite cookbooks start appearing. For the 3rd year running we've compiled all these lists for the Eat Your Books Best of the Best Cookbooks list. This year we're delighted to announce joint winners - Momofuku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi and Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. The list is an amalgamation of 195 Best of 2011 lists from TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, Websites, Blogs and Booksellers across the world so it is apt that a baking book from a New York bakery and a vegetarian book from a London café were the winners. The 3rd spot was taken by Jacques Pépin with Essential Pepin - with 60 years as a chef and the author of 26 cookbooks Jacques would be one of very few authors who could produce a cookbook with over 800 favorite recipes.

This is the second year that a Momofuku book has won, in 2009 David Chang's restaurant book Momofuku took the top spot and interestingly this is the 2nd year running Plenty has appeared in the list. Last year it came 6th as it was released in the UK in 2010 and this year it's become a huge success in the US as well. It's an amazing achievement for an author these days to be successful in the US, UK and Australia/New Zealand, without having their own TV show. To find out more about how we compile this list and to see who made the Top 10 go to the Best of the Best Cookbooks of 2011. Also listed are the top books for Britain, Canada, Australia, Drinks, Vegetarian & Vegan and Memoirs.

As well as personal recipe indexing - we've added a few more features that we hope you'll enjoy.

EYB has become a lot more colorful with the addition of images for your online recipes.  If you're using the "online recipes" filter you'll see images for the recipes and when you're in the details page you can zoom out to a larger image.   In case you're wondering why we don't have images for all recipes on EYB - copyright issues make this impossible, as would the logistics of sourcing and loading them.

We now have over 400 magazines in the EYB Library, most are either indexed or will be soon.  We've made it much simpler to add your magazine collection to your Bookshelf.   Now you can use the date range option to select your magazines. If you subscribe to a magazine you can select the option to have each new month automatically added to your Bookshelf.  

With more magazines and blogs being added from different countries, we thought it would be useful to be able to select books, magazines and blogs from a country you're most interested in.  On the Filter bar you'll see a new filter called "Countries".  

Do you have stacks of recipe clippings that you've saved from magazines; been given by friends; printed out from the internet?  They seemed so delicious at the time but, once they go into that big, black hole - called the 'clippings file/box/drawer' they seem to disappear once they're swallowed up by your filing system.  Trying to recall what that recipe was, where it is and even remembering it exists are some of the hazards of having a clippings file.

For many people, including us, that collection of personal recipes contains a lot of treasures.  So we're giving EYB members access to the entire library of ingredients, categories and classifications.  You can now index your personal recipes in the same way as your cookbook, magazine and blog recipes.  So next time you are trying to find the chocolate cake recipe that your friend gave you, it will come up in your search results.

A Help file gives you guidelines on how to index your recipes so that they are consistent with EYB indexed recipes.  It's up to you how consistent and accurate you want to be, as you're the only person who will be able to see the recipes.  Though if you categorize your recipes using EYB standard categories you'll be able to find them using the EYB category filters. 

We will shortly be introducing another feature that will let you add online recipes - these will be public.   Let us know what you think on the Forum. Find out more »

500,000 recipes indexed - that's a lot of data inputting! Many people assume that this is an automated process - no, it's all done manually!  It's the only way we can provide such precise and accurate recipe searches by ingredients and categories.  No other recipe search engine does this!  We have a wonderful team of indexers headed by Deborah who take on any challenge they're given. 

Larousse Gastronomique (3,880 recipes), Joy of Cooking (3 editions and 8,614 recipes), Noma (86 new ingredients), Modernist Cuisine (144 new ingredients - see below) were amongst the more challenging projects.  The largest EYB Bookshelves have around 200,000 recipes - most belong to libraries: French Culinary Institute, Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts and more recently America's Test Kitchen, but some personal collections are also coming close.

There seems to be a lot of online debate in the last few days on what the future holds for cookbooks.  The most exciting article for us, because EYB was the focus and it was carried around the globe, was the Associated Press article by Michele Kayal.  One of our most enthusiastic members, Mary-Claire van Leunen does a great job promoting the benefits of using the site.

On the side of print cookbooks is Adam Roberts, whose blog The Amateur Gourmet, has spawned a memoir/cookbook.  As Adam says "Cookbooks aren't just vessels for information, recipe containers that serve a purely functional purpose. The best cookbooks transcend their function-they become indelible objects, beacons of inspiration."  The vast majority of the post comments couldn't imagine switching from print to digital (and EYB got a couple of mentions as the perfect bridge between the two).

On the other side of the argument was Paula Forbes on Eater.com who said "Much like how music has become a cheap, digital commodity, cookbooks will follow suit - mere texts that will be sold on Amazon or iTunes for, say, $3.99. The printed cookbooks of the future will be gourmet trophies."

Jennifer Day in the Chicago Tribune takes as her starting point the imminent release of Mastering the Art of French Cooking as an eBook.  Cookbook author Molly O'Neill is quoted extensively and backs up the assertions of Paula Forbes "Ultimately, O'Neill says, she thinks that print cookbooks will continue to thrive, but with more of a literary bent. Recipes and instruction will continue to migrate toward electronic formats. Some cookbooks may feature fewer recipes and push people to the Web for more."

I'm going to leave the final word to Jay Rayner, the extremely witty British food writer, whose memoir The Man Who Ate the World I can highly recommend.  In an article in the Guardian last year he said "What I would love to see is someone going into the Apple store on Regent Street to explain that the reason their iPhone is broken is because they smeared pesto all over it.  I think people will find when their iPhone is covered in crap, that cooking with an iPhone is not such a good idea."

Have you ever clicked on another member's username to see the list of books they own?  It's the next best thing to standing in front of their bookcase.  Now we've made it easier for you to browse 1,000s of other members' Bookshelves, and compare them with your own collection.  We've made several improvements to the profile page and will continue to enhance it:

• It's easier to see your own! Just click on your username in the top right hand corner and select Profile.  You will see what other members see when they click on your username. If you want to edit your Profile, just click on the Edit link. 
• You can now add a link from your profile to your own blog or website.  A great way to drive traffic to your site is to post on the forum and write recipe and book notes.  If they're interesting they'll want to read more.
• If you have a website, you can now show your followers your cookbook collection by posting an icon on your site that links directly to your EYB Bookshelf. Check our How to section for details.

Your profile is where you can tell other EYB members about yourself - it's interesting when reading Notes to learn more about the writer.  A Note that says "the family loved it" has more meaning if you know that "the family" are toddlers or teenage boys.  Do also consider adding in your city, as we will be using this in future to advise about events in your area.

We have just indexed our 2,000th cookbook and we are heading towards half a million recipes. With lots of magazines and blogs now being indexed too, the recipe index on Eat Your Books just keeps getting more and more useful.

Don't forget you can add any of the online recipes to your Bookshelf - you don't have to own the book or magazine to access the more than 9,000 recipes that are available online. Just click Online recipes when you are in Recipes search and click +Bookshelf to add them to your own recipe collection.

And of course you can add any blog to your Bookshelf and all those great recipes then become part of your searches. Smitten Kitchen and Chocolate & Zucchini are being completed now - together they will give you over 1,000 fantastic recipes. And we will be adding more blogs all the time so check the list regularly.

To celebrate our 2,000th book we are offering you the chance to win any one of the books indexed so far. Just check our Twitter account and retweet the one announcing the 2,000th book.

We have now completed our first blog index - 1,099 recipes from the Simply Recipes blog by Elsie Bauer.  You can add the blog and recipes to your Bookshelf - every recipe has a Recipe online link back to the Simply Recipes site.  Another great feature on the blog recipes is that we can add the blogger's photos, which really enhances the recipe listing.  Eventually when we have enough photos we will add them to recipe search results, in the same way book covers appear on book search results.

You can also add online recipes individually to your Bookshelf - you don't need to own the book or magazine to access the recipes.  We have more than 3,400 online recipes available so far and we are adding more all the time.  Just click the +Bookshelf button next to individual online recipes.  Or for magazines such as Bon Appétit that have most of their recipes available online, you can add the entire magazine to your Bookshelf.

We are next indexing the recipes from Food52 and 5 Second Rule.  Thanks for all the votes for your favorite food blogs.  Don't forget to complete the survey at the bottom of the Community page if you haven't already done so.  So far the survey results show the following top choices:

Smitten Kitchen
101 Cookbooks
David Lebovitz
Orangette
Pioneer Woman
Chocolate and Zucchini

To make Eat Your Books even more useful we are adding blogs and food websites so you can now search ALL the recipes you want to use - whether they are in your cookbooks, in your magazines or on your favorite website.  

Over the next few months we'll be adding more blogs and websites and we'd love to hear which ones you'd like to see included - a survey is on the Community page. We are only adding blogs with original recipes.  Once a blog is added to your Bookshelf the recipes on that website become part of your recipe search.

There are now separate tabs for Books, Magazines, Blogs and Recipes.   The recipes tab includes all recipes from all sources - but by using the filter on the right hand side you can select to see recipes from one source only.  The online recipes filter is also available for the Library - so you can now search all recipes that have an online link - particularly useful if you're away from home without your books.